


the desert is in the heart of your brother

by Whitherward



Series: that which fate binds together [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Background Relationships, El is fucked up, Everyone Needs Therapy, F/M, Gen, Mike Wheeler has Unresolved Abandonment Issues, Mike became a more major part of this story than orginally intended, Platonic Soulmates, Will & El centric, Will is fucked up, background Jopper, background mileven then FOREGROUND mileven, everyone is fucked up, nobody is communicating effectively
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-05-14 23:17:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19283224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whitherward/pseuds/Whitherward
Summary: There is a worm at the heart of the tower, that is why it will not stand.A story about learning to exist in the world. Will and El grow up.





	1. Will

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: There is nothing explicit but this fic does contain vague mentions of suicide/suicidal thoughts and addiction issues. Take care. 
> 
> \--
> 
> Summary quote is Neil Gaiman. Title is T.S. Eliot.
> 
> \--

Will Byers graduates with a full ride to UC San Diego for studio arts.

He has to go, he has to. These Indiana winters are killing him from the inside out. He wants a change. He wants the sun and the warmth and the light. He is running from his life, running _for_ his life.

This is what he tells El with shaking hands and a shaking voice.

She is sitting on the edge of her bed and the late afternoon sun filtering into the room is falling across her face, highlighting the tear tracks on her pale cheeks. Will is on his knees in front of her, grasping her hands in his, willing her with every fiber of his being to please understand. He doesn’t want to leave her but he has to get as far away from this place as he can. If that means leaving his family and his friends and everything he knows and _El_ , then this is what has to be.

He has to go to save his own life.

It is the hardest thing he’s ever done.

She takes his face in her hands and presses her forehead to his. They stay like this for a long time, breathing together. His face is wet with her tears, or maybe they are his own. He can’t tell anymore. But he knows that she understands.

This is how it always is with them. They don’t say it, but he knows that she knows.

For now, it’s enough.

\--

She doesn’t come to the airport to say goodbye. It stings a little, but Will understands why she doesn’t want to. They say their goodbyes at home, standing in the driveway.

“Thank you,” he says, holding one of her hands loosely in his. 

“For what?”

“Understanding why I have to do this. I _need_ this.”

“I know,” she says, and he knows she knows. “It’ll be hard.” 

This is a statement of fact, without malice or judgement, and he knows that too.

He grips her hand tight suddenly, urgently. “If it gets hard, for me, don’t tell anyone.”

She frowns at him, but doesn’t speak. He knows she detests lying and liars, and most assuredly she thinks their friends and family would want to know if he wasn’t okay. He holds her gaze. 

They both know what he’s asking of her. 

Eventually she nods and squeezes his hand a little in return.

“You know how to find me,” is all she says. 

He takes her by the shoulders and kisses her lightly on the forehead. 

She doesn’t hang around outside to watch them drive away, and he doesn't look back as they do. His heart is breaking, and he’s not sure the feeling is entirely his own. 

\--

San Diego is a revelation for Will. He has never seen the ocean before and he falls in love with it immediately.

Everything is different here. The air, the light, the people. He’s lost in the crowd. No one here knows Will Byers. No one knows or cares if he was a brief news item in his tiny Midwestern town. Here he’s not poor Will Byers, dead Will Byers, freak Will Byers.

Here he’s absolutely no one.

It’s incredible.

He introduces himself to his roommate by shaking his hand and saying ‘Hi, I’m Will’ and for the first time he can remember there is no knowing look on the other person's face, just a friendly smile and an introduction in return.

He goes to his classes and the teachers don’t pause over his name. His classmates don’t whisper and stare at him when they think he’s not looking. He’s just another face in the crowd, in more ways than one.

He knows he’s got talent, and his teachers know it too, but he lacks technique. They tell him he can do better, and so he has to push himself for the first time he can remember. At Hawkins High he’d been a head and shoulders above his classmates, more. Here, he’s just a talented kid in a room full of talented kids and if he wants to stand out for the right reasons he’ll have to try harder than he’s ever needed to before. 

He takes classes where his talented hands can’t carry him through, art history, color theory. He has to study, he takes detailed notes and then spends hours reviewing them, doing additional reading, experimenting in his sketchbook, trying out new ideas. 

He falls into bed exhausted at the end of every day, and he doesn’t dream.

\--

The constant buzzing presence of El in the back of his mind is gone. It’s become so much background noise to him over the past few years, it doesn’t really occur to him to miss it until a quiet moment when he sits down to write his first letter to her. 

He supposes it makes sense - their connection was always strongest with proximity. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that putting two thousand miles between them would have this kind of effect.

He wonders if he could still find her, if he tried to reach out for her.

He doesn’t try. Tells himself it’s not because he’s scared the answer is ‘no’. 

\--

His life is busy too. His roommate, Mark, is a lot more social than Will. There’s a constant stream of people into the room, and with them a constant stream of ‘this is my roommate, Will’ with the accompanying exchange of polite nods. Mark always makes a point of introducing him.

Mark is on a basketball scholarship. Mark is also the kind of guy who gave Will and his friends a hard time in school. But he’s cheerful and loud and friendly - he reminds Will a little of Dustin in his bearing - and other than saying hello in passing, they don’t talk very much in the first weeks they live together. 

Will is sitting on his bed one evening, record playing and drawing idly in his sketchbook when Mark walks in. Will is surprised, he thought Mark would be at practise, and says as much. 

“Yeah, it got cut short when Paul rolled his ankle and snapped it,” says Mark, dumping his bag on his bed. 

Will, having no clue what happens at basketball practise and even less clue who Paul is, hums vaguely and goes back to his work for a few seconds until a shadow blocks his light. 

“Hey cool, did you draw that?” Mark is leaning over him curiously.

Will bites down on the urge to respond sarcastically and simply says, “Yeah.” 

“It’s really good, man. Like _really_ good. Can I see?” and he goes right ahead and sits down on the edge of Will’s bed, looking at the sketchbook expectantly. Will is so dumbfounded he hands it right over. 

“What do you do here anyway?” asks Mark, flipping through the pages.

“Studio arts.”

“Yeah, I guess I should have figured that out for myself.” 

Will has a sudden fit of self-consciousness and tries to make a grab for it back. “It’s just dumb concept sketches.”

Mark stands and, in one smooth motion, deftly maneuvers the sketchbook out of Will’s reach. “Don’t be modest, you’re really talented.”

Mark lands on the sketch Will had been working on before he was interrupted, and hands the book back. 

“That was cool, thanks for showing me,” he says, even though Will did nothing of the sort. “Hey, you eat yet?”

This is how they end up in the dining hall sharing a table and getting to know each other a little better. It turns out that although Mark is on a basketball scholarship, he’s studying psychology, which seems like an odd combination to Will but given his own background it feels like the height of hypocrisy to make judgments on anyone else. It’s surprisingly pleasant to just sit and talk. He’s been so absorbed in his classes and finding his way around campus, he doesn’t think he’s had a conversation that wasn’t directly related to either art or asking for directions with anyone, pretty much since he got here. 

Eating dinner with Mark turns into a routine. They are joined periodically by some of Mark’s friends and team-mates, and occasionally by some of Will’s classmates. It’s a pretty diverse group of people, from different places, with different interests, but everyone gets along and it makes for some good dinner conversation.

It’s not too long before Will recognises people as he passes them on campus, stops to talk, pulls up a chair and a coffee, gets invited places. He’s building a network and while he wouldn’t necessarily call any of them friends at this stage, it’s nice to have people to hang out with again.

\--

He calls home every Sunday and dutifully fills his mother in on everything he’s done that week. He knows she’s worried, can hear the tightness in her voice but he’s oddly grateful for her forced cheer. For all she wasn’t thrilled about him moving to California, she didn’t try to stop him from going and she doesn’t voice her concerns to him. 

Sometimes he talks to Hopper if the older man picks up the phone. Most of Hop’s questions tend toward his personal safety and state of mind, and Will just keeps repeating that he’s doing fine, everything is fine, _no really_. Hop tells Will that he can call if he needs, and Will knows that he actually can. Promises he will. Knows he won’t. 

\--

In Hawkins, he had a fairly sedentary existence. In San Diego he tries to walk along the waterfront every day, and he can feel himself getting stronger with the sunlight and the sea air.

Mark runs along the beach every evening and passes him walking in the opposite direction. He mentions this in passing to Will at dinner, and Will is slightly floored - he’s been so enchanted with the water and the people and the air that he hasn't even registered his roommate.

Mark invites him to go running one evening. It sounds like a nice idea, and it fits in with his image of his new California life - to be the sort of person who runs along the beach - so Will figures he'll give it a try. 

Absolutely everything about it is awful. 

He hasn't realised how unfit he is, he tries to keep up and makes it approximately five hundred yards before slumping forward with his hands on his knees, wheezing. It takes Mark about another twenty feet to realise Will is no longer running with him and he doubles back. At first, Will thinks he is going to be made fun of but Mark claps him on the back and scolds him for not saying he was struggling with the pace.

Once Will has caught his breath, they continue on with a mixture of running and walking that is more Will's speed, figuratively and literally. Mark seems to take it as a personal challenge to build Will's fitness, and it becomes another routine. Eventually Will is able to keep pace without trouble.

He doesn't share Mark's enthusiasm for running or other physical activity, but he feels stronger and he has more energy, so he joins Mark twice a week to run and the other days he takes his regular walk. He does make sure to wave to Mark as they pass each other on these days though.

\--

November comes, and it's horribly jarring. 

Life goes on around him as normal, and he suddenly feels like he’s standing still. His mood gets blacker and blacker, and the sun continues to shine, the air is still bright and sharp with the tang of ocean salt.

The first nightmare he has in San Diego wakes him up at three in the morning, and he can’t move. His heart is pounding so hard all he can hear is his blood rushing in his ears, and he struggles to breathe normally. Eventually, the sound recedes and he can hear Mark snoring on the other side of the room. He lies there, paralyzed, until the sun comes up. As soon as the first morning light starts to filter into the room he heaves out of bed, limbs heavy with relief. 

He tries to shrug it off, and for a few days there are no nightmares. He thinks perhaps it’s a one-off but then he has another, and another, and another. 

He writes his letters to El and tries to keep the tone light and chatty. He gets her letters in return and clutches them like a drowning man clinging to a liferaft. Reading her scratchy writing, he can hear her voice in his head clear as day. He can almost _smell_ her, that mix of lavender shampoo and cut grass, and wonders if there is some kind of psychic trace of her imprinted in the very ink. 

He knows this is ridiculous. Knows it’s just him wanting it so badly his mind is playing tricks on him.

He reads and re-reads the letters, keeps them in his pockets, takes them out and turns the paper in his hands absently when he is deep inside his own head. He does it enough that Mark asks if he’s got a girl back home. Will tells him they are from his twin sister, but doesn’t elaborate any further. 

Over dinner one night someone mentions that they’ve heard somewhere that twins hearts start beating at exactly the same time, and Mark comments offhandedly that Will has a twin. Every head turns toward Will with polite interest. Will nods his confirmation but takes a large bite of his burger instead of saying any more. El is just for him, she doesn’t feel like something he wants to share with these people. The conversation moves on but it nags at Will for days. 

El is several months older than Will, and he didn’t know her for twelve years besides, he didn’t feel it when her heart started beating. He wonders if he’ll feel when it stops. 

It’s a thought that haunts him, occurs to him unbidden and unwelcome in the dark hours when sleep escapes him, and he prays to any god who will listen that he dies first. (He doesn’t. When she goes, he’ll feel the world turn cold.)

\--

His classes start to suffer. He starts handing in work late, and then not at all. One day he sits down to a lecture and it’s only when everyone around him starts packing their things and leaving that he realizes he’s sat through the whole thing and not absorbed a single word. 

One of his teachers pulls him aside one day and asks if anything is the matter. Will doesn’t know what to say so he says nothing, and eventually the teacher waves him away with a frustrated sigh. 

\--

He’s become snappy and short with the people around him, and his almost-not-quite new friends are worried, but they don’t know how to act with him now so they start to drift away.

He takes to walking again when he can’t sleep. It was a tactic that served him well in Hawkins where the woods and bitter cold had driven him to exhaustion, but here the urban sprawl just presses in on him. The chill is sharp but it doesn’t sink into his bones in the same way. 

When he comes back to the dorm at the crack of dawn, pale and haggard and miserable, Mark is worried and freaked out. He keeps asking what’s wrong but Will can’t tell him, and it puts a strain on their friendship.

Will is isolated here on the west coast. While no one here treats him like a freak, it also means they don’t understand when he draws into himself. However much he needed to get out on his own and breathe, he realises he still needs his friends. His family. People who know.

It hurts Will more than he thought it would, and he realises that this is how the rest of his life will be. There will always be a huge part of him that is closed off from all but a select few. He can’t escape this, he will carry it always. 

No matter how far he runs, he cannot outrun himself.

It’s a bitter, bitter pill to swallow.

\--

He stays on campus during Christmas break. The thought of going home fills him with dread. He’s not doing well and he might be able to hide it from his family and maybe even his friends, but not from El. He never could hide anything from her. 

Their connection is dead right now but as soon as he sets foot in Hawkins she’ll know everything without him saying a single word. He thinks back on all the letters he’s sent her saying how great he’s doing, every word a lie. He’s never lied to her. It’s never been possible before. 

He thinks too, about the promise he extracted from her before he left. He’s not sure which would be worse, El finding out he’s been lying to her or forcing her to lie on his behalf. Both options make him feel sick to his stomach.

He tells his mother he can’t afford the plane ticket home, and when she tells him she and Hop can send some money he gently declines. He tells her a group of his friends are staying on campus over break, more lies, and she seems happier with the thought that he won’t be alone. 

On Christmas Eve, Will waits to call home until he knows everyone will be out at the Wheeler’s annual party, and leaves a short message in as cheerful a voice as he can manage. He wishes everyone a Merry Christmas, tells them he loves them and that he’s going to bed early and then heading to a friend’s in the morning. 

He spends the next twenty-four hours lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, not sleeping. 

\--

New Year’s comes and goes, and he doesn’t see anyone. He sits in his room with the blinds drawn, listening to the sound of fireworks and people celebrating on the street. 

In the first week of January, people start to trickle back to campus. A few notes get slipped under Will’s door and go unanswered. One evening he can hear voices in the hall, people he knows on their way to get dinner. They knock on his door as they pass and he stays quiet until they leave. 

Mark arrives back late one night and Will pretends to be asleep while he gets settled. When the sound of Mark’s breathing evens out and he starts to snore softly, Will gets up and gets dressed. 

He walks aimlessly through the streets until the sunrise streaks the sky blood red. _Red sky in the morning,_ he thinks idly, as he makes his way back to his room. 

Mark is awake, dressed for basketball practise, and greets Will brightly enough when he comes through the door. Will can see the worry behind his roommate's eyes, and doesn’t answer as he slumps face down on his bed. 

\--

They don’t talk so much after that.

\--

One night Will walks down to the beach. The air smells of asphalt and ocean as he listens to the crash of the waves in the darkness and thinks long and hard about walking straight out into the water and letting it close over his head. 

He calls Jonathan.

\--

Jonathan makes a plan. Handles the logistics. 

He’s always been good in a crisis. 

\--

Will transfers to NYU for the spring semester and crashes on his brother’s couch. 

He spends the first two weeks sleeping almost solidly, until the morning that Nancy whips the blankets off him and tells him to get himself to class. 

He sits up, bleary and annoyed. She’s looking at him with that hard-faced, eyebrow-raised Wheeler look - the same one he’s seen on Mike’s face too many times to count - and he’s about to snap something nasty at her when he catches sight of Jonathan sitting at the breakfast bar behind her, watching him over the top of his coffee mug, eyes worried but warning. 

Whatever Will was going to say dies in his throat and he sits sullenly and listens as Nancy tells him they love him, and they’re here for him, and they’ll support him in any way they can, but they didn’t bring him out here so he could sleep his life away on the sofa. 

He’s still sullen as he showers, and roots around his still-packed pile of stuff for something resembling school supplies. He slams the door on his way out and doesn’t feel bad about it as he slopes off to class. 

\--

Jonathan and Nancy have acquiesced to Will’s desperate pleading and haven’t told anyone about his abrupt departure from San Diego. In hindsight, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise when a letter arrives at their apartment a week after Will himself does, addressed to him in El’s messy handwriting. 

_Tell me what’s happening,_ it says. 

Will throws some nasty accusations at his brother, who absolutely denies telling her. 

“You know how El is,” says Jonathan. “She just knows this stuff. She can tell!”

“She _can’t!_ ” snaps Will, and he bites down on the rest ( _because I can’t_ ) before it spills out of him. 

_It’s gone_ , he thinks desperately, _it’s all gone_.

It’s deeply troubling to him. He doesn’t answer the letter. 

\--

Will isn’t really sure how to feel about New York City. It’s a huge change from San Diego, which he supposes was sort of the point, but all it seems to do is remind him bitterly of his failure. He couldn’t even last one semester on his own before running to his big brother, tail between his legs. 

The cold is the thing. It’s freezing. He trudges through the grey slush every day to and from class, and the wind cuts through his inadequate layers of clothing like a knife. It makes his bones ache. Another reminder that he’s not out West and it makes him angry but it also makes him feel something else, something unnameable, haunting in its familiarity. 

It’s when he’s sick with a shivering fever and the skin on his hands is dry and cracked from the cold that he finally admits defeat and calls his mother, asks her to send his good winter clothes to New York. He doesn’t have anything suitable with him, he’d never expected to need it. 

News travels almost supernaturally fast after that, and Jonathan’s phone rings and rings over the next few days. Will talks to his mom. He talks to Dustin. He talks to Lucas and Max on the same call. He talks to his mom again. He talks to Hopper. He talks to his mom _again_. 

Will tries to put them off - he just doesn’t have the energy for these conversations. He is noncommittal about his reasons for transferring but his friends have the scent now, like bloodhounds, _a Party member requires assistance_ , and he loves them but they won’t stop _fucking_ calling. He straight up puts the phone down on Dustin when he starts making noises about coming to New York to see him. 

El doesn’t call.

He speaks to Mike, who sounds oddly stiff. It’s a weird conversation, and Will can’t tell if he’s worried or pissed off or _what_. Will gathers enough nerve to ask how El is doing, and Mike’s reply of ‘fine’ is said with a tone that firmly indicates he’ll say no more on the subject, so they move on. 

His friends are not easily avoided. They keep calling, so he keeps talking. He apologises to Dustin for hanging up on him. Lucas calls him first thing in the morning, every morning. Max calls him at seven sharp every evening ‘for a chat’. His mother calls every day, sometimes several times a day. 

Jonathan catches him leaving the apartment one night to walk the streets, and goes with him. At first Will is deeply irritated by the intrusion, and he makes this very apparent. Jonathan is undeterred and talks as he strolls along beside Will, pointing out landmarks or shortcuts or places he likes that he thinks Will should check out. 

Jonathan is talking like he thinks Will is going to make a life here, and it hits Will like a punch in the gut that that’s probably _exactly_ what he thinks because Will _lives_ here now. If he actually gets his shit together and finishes college, he’ll be living here for a few years at least. 

It’s the stupidest, simplest thing. It’s the first time that idea has penetrated the fog in his brain. He, Will Byers, lives in New York City. His world hasn’t ended. He is a person who lives in a place, he is eighteen years old and he can have a life. 

El never calls and he doesn’t call her. He speaks to Mike a few more times but he’s still getting a weird vibe off him, and he’s not sure what to do about that. Will doesn’t ask about El again and he’s not sure if it’s making the situation better or worse. 

He asks Nancy about it one night when they’re sitting on opposite sides of the breakfast bar, passing a cigarette back and forth. She’s developed into something of a chain smoker since moving to the City, and Will has been a perennially casual smoker since his early teens (first stealing cigarettes from his mother, who didn’t notice, then stealing them from Hopper, who definitely _did_ notice but pretended not to). 

He’s never really spent much time with Nancy before, at least not on a one-to-one basis, but he finds himself chatting to her often in the evenings before Jonathan gets home. He likes her sense of humor, dry and slightly dark like his own, she swears like a sailor and she has a knack for storytelling. He can see, too, why she and Mike often rub each other the wrong way - the similarities between them are as striking as the differences. Will can’t believe he’s never noticed. 

Mostly, he appreciates her no-nonsense approach to life. Her advice is straightforward and practical, and she doesn’t try to baby him. 

“If you want to speak to El you’re going to have to make the first move, kiddo”

Will frowns at the nickname. “What if she’s not calling because she’s mad at me?” It’s a stupid thing to say and he knows it. 

Nancy clearly knows it too because she gives him a Look. “We both know that’s not how she operates. She’s probably trying to give you space.”

“What about Mike?”

Nancy waves a hand dismissively in a gesture that clearly means ‘what _about_ Mike’. “You know how he is, he gets super weird about El. If she’s upset about this, he’s going to get pissy.”

Something about this statement, at least, feels wrong to Will, but he doesn’t say anything, just passes the cigarette back to her when she reaches for it. 

\--

Enough is enough. He’s not brave enough to call, but he writes to El and pours his heart out, page after page after page. He tells her every sorry detail, every lie, every failure. 

He mails the letter before he can talk himself out of it and forces himself to walk away from the mailbox instead of trying to break into it to steal the letter back. 

He can’t sleep after sending it, can’t focus on anything except what El’s reaction might be. He checks the mail frantically every morning and his heart stutters when he eventually sees her barely-legible chicken scratch. 

He locks himself in the bathroom and tears the envelope with shaking hands. _I love you so much_ , the letter begins, and Will sits abruptly on the bathroom floor and cries. 

He feels lighter, after that. 

\--

It’s extremely challenging to get back into the swing of going to class. Toward the end of the semester in San Diego he’d barely been attending classes at all, and he hadn’t been engaged in the ones he had been going to. 

He can’t afford to miss anything here. His GPA is in the garbage, he’s only been allowed a transfer on the strength of his portfolio and, he strongly suspects, a few strings pulled by a department head who owed a favor to Jonathan (and what he wouldn’t give to know the whole of _that_ story).

He’s still not in a place where he particularly cares about his education, but Jonathan and Nancy have made it very clear that if he wastes this opportunity, he’s on his own. He resents that but it does force him to act. His brother has stuck his neck out for him, is housing him, feeding him. Will loves him. Will also has no money, he’s in a strange city, and his only backup plan if he screws this up is to go back to Hawkins. 

So he goes to class. 

It’s weird at first, everyone already knows everyone else, they know the teachers. Will doesn’t know anyone, he doesn’t know his way around the campus, which isn’t really a campus so much as a bunch of buildings scattered around Greenwich Village. He gets lost trying to find the admissions office, he gets lost trying to see his advisor, he gets lost on the way to all his classes the first, second and third time he has to go. 

And then he doesn’t get lost anymore. He learns what subway lines he needs to take to get from Jonathan’s apartment to where he needs to be. He learns shortcuts between buildings, and where to get good coffee on the way to class. 

He starts talking to his teachers, finding out what he can do for extra credit. He talks to other students sometimes, although he declines every invitation to socialise outside of class. 

Before he knows it, he’s got a routine, and he’s not asleep on the couch all day anymore. 

He’s still a night owl though, he’s not sure that will ever change. He likes walking around the city at night - the hustle and bustle never dies down, and the people watching is almost as good as in the daytime. Tourists don’t come out late at night, and it changes the feeling of the neighbourhood. 

He likes to visit all-night diners, places he can tuck into a back corner and nurse a single cup of coffee and just watch the world go by. He learns the places where the waitresses will let him linger for a few hours without bothering him, and learns to avoid the places they kick him out when he won’t order anything. 

He sees all sorts of things. Homeless people buying hot coffee with change, cops coming off shift, couples in love and couples breaking up. A few random loners like him, sitting quietly with their thoughts. It’s nice. It reminds him that there’s a whole world of people, all living lives, all having problems and joys and little tragedies. 

He’s not alone in a void. 

\--

Late one afternoon, he’s walking through a park on his way home. There’s a human statue, painted all in silver, and two girls lounging on a blanket in the golden afternoon sunshine. It’s so picturesque, Will reaches automatically into his bag for his sketchbook before realising he doesn’t have it with him.

He stares hard for a moment before hurrying home. He sketches loosely, achieving in a few rough lines what a great many artists could not in a full painting. It’s an accomplished drawing by any standard but Will is dissatisfied. The scene is too hazy in his memory and he has not been able to capture what so charmed him about it. 

From that point on, he starts carrying a sketchbook and pencils on his person at all times. The urge to draw doesn’t always strike, but sometimes it does. Something is flowing again that hasn’t in a long while. It feels important. 

\--

It’s his ceramics teacher who gets him started with volunteering. 

Will is not and has never been a ceramic artist but he needed something to round out his portfolio and this class fit in with his schedule (‘fit in’ here meaning ‘doesn’t take place before midday’). 

It’s a mistake. He just doesn’t have a gift for three-dimensional art forms. It’s incredibly frustrating, and no matter how much he tries he has extreme difficulty producing anything other than shapeless lumps of clay. He’s well on his way to failing this class and he knows it. 

Will is pitching his latest mess into the trash one afternoon when the teacher announces a charity he’s involved with needs volunteers. Anyone willing to give their time is offered a five-point raise in their grade. 

“This could save some of your GPAs,” the teacher says pointedly, pinning a sign-up sheet to the bulletin board. 

Will only chews it over for a minute before writing his name down. He doesn’t have anything to lose, after all, and God only knows he has plenty of free time on his hands. 

The charity turns out to be a shelter for homeless kids. The work isn’t hard, exactly. Making beds, helping cook and serve meals, talking to the kids and making sure they get settled. 

What’s hard is having to look into their eyes and recognise what’s looking back, that hopeless thousand-yard stare he’s seen so many times in the mirror. It makes him take a hard look at his own life. No matter what he’s seen, been through, he has a home and a family that loves him. He had somewhere to run when he needed it. These kids have nothing, no one. 

The programme he signed up for through school only requires him to be at the shelter four hours per week, but he starts to spend more time there. It’s not long until he’s there every day. He helps out with cooking and making beds, but he spends a lot of time just talking to the kids, getting to know them. He starts to recognise the regulars, get friendly with them. 

There’s a side door that opens out into an alleyway, and a lot of the time Will sits out on the step to smoke. The regular kids start to seek him out when they come through, sit out on the steps with him to talk, and it’s not long before he has an informal kind of support group going. 

It’s not easy to listen to them. Some of them have always been alone. Some have passed through the system and slipped through the cracks. Some have run away from terrible situations and found themselves in worse ones. They all just want to be heard. All their stories are harrowing - Will thought he knew what evil was, but not like this. He loses sleep, but he doesn’t stop sitting out on the steps with them. He knows, at least, what it means to have someone listen to you. He can do that for them, if he can do nothing else. 

His ceramics teacher, Frank, pulls him aside one day. 

“You’re really good with these kids,” he says. 

Will gives a small smile and shrugs, not really sure what to say. 

“Try not to get too involved in their lives,” Frank continues. Will frowns and opens his mouth to speak but Frank holds a hand up. “It’s not a criticism. Just...you need to look out for yourself too.”

Will thinks he knows what he’s getting at, but this is also the only thing he’s done in a long time that feels worthwhile. He needs it. 

\--

As much as he loves them, Will can’t keep living on Jonathan and Nancy’s couch. It had felt safe at first, but now it feels slightly suffocating. He’s pretty sure he’s cramping their style too - it’s a small place, cosy enough for two but three is most definitely a crowd.

He doesn’t have a lot of options. He’s incredibly broke - his few hours washing dishes at a local restaurant doesn’t bring in much more than pocket money. Student housing is out of the question and besides, it’s all full this late in the year. He can’t afford to rent privately. 

There’s a guy who works at the shelter who Will is friendly with. Gary is a tattoo artist who volunteers his spare time - he’s tall and gaunt and covered, as far as Will can tell, almost head to toe in tattoos including on the top of his shaved head. His appearance is intimidating but he has a warm and calming personality, and Will likes him a lot. 

Will mentions his housing dilemma casually to him one day, and Gary gives him a long look that Will can’t read before saying there’s a space just opened up in his building. 

This is how Will ends up in what is probably the second scariest place his small-town self has ever been. The neighbourhood is rough, the buildings are in bad shape and half the storefronts are boarded up. They pass two guys doing a drug deal in broad daylight. It’s not all that far from the shelter as it turns out. 

Gary leads him into a tenement building with a heavy door on rusted hinges that he has to shoulder open and they climb a stairwell covered in graffiti and smelling strongly of cigarette smoke, something more foul lingering underneath. 

“I’m on the second floor,” Gary says, as they pass it on the stairwell. “The empty place is on the fourth.” 

‘The empty place’ turns out to be a room with grimy floorboards and drywall crumbling to expose brick. There’s a bed in the corner, and piles of books and clothes scattered around. 

“I thought you said it was empty,” Will says, poking his head in to look around. 

“It is,” Gary leans on the doorframe, hands in pockets. “The old guy who lived here died last week.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah. He died in that bed, you might want to get a new one.”

Will, who’s been prodding the mattress, takes a quick step back. The windows are dirty, filtering the light and giving it an odd yellow tinge. He looks around, noticing something. 

“No bathroom?”

“Up the hall. Gotta share.” Gary gestures with his head. “Running water and electric sometimes.”

“What do you mean _sometimes_? What’s the rent?”

“No rent.”

Will stares. “What?”

Gary grins and shrugs. “The people who live here aren’t _technically_ tennants,” he says. “But the building would be empty otherwise. Or bulldozed.”

Will looks around again, seeing with fresh eyes. The ‘no rent’ situation has got his attention. It’s a big enough space, just for him. He doesn’t really mind sharing a bathroom. He wouldn’t have to pay…

“It’s close to the shelter. Closer to school than where you live now, too.” The way Gary is looking at him, he knows he’s got him. 

Will looks at him and grins, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “When can I move in?”

“Whenever you want, today even,” Gary says. “Might want to get rid of that bed though.”

“Yeah.”

\--

He still gets his mail delivered to Jonathan's apartment. One day he receives a postcard with a photograph of the pandas at San Diego Zoo on the front. It's from Mark.

It reads ' _Hope the Big Apple is awesome. Moved off campus. Let me know how you are_ ' and lists an address in messy hurried scrawl. Will is oddly touched. It's such a small thing. His relationship with his roommate had been strained and cool when he’d abruptly packed all his belongings and announced he was transferring, and despite promises to keep in touch, Will had genuinely never expected to hear from Mark again.

A few nights later, in a booth in his favorite all-night diner, he scribbles a hasty letter in reply. It's only one side of paper torn from his sketchbook, but he writes that classes are going well, and about his new living situation, and about how New York summers are the worst.

He mails it off without expecting an answer, but a few weeks later a letter arrives - three pages, chatty and full of news about mutual acquaintances back in California.

Will reads this with mixed feelings, reads it a few times until the pages are creased. Mark writes the way he speaks and Will can almost hear his voice. 

He misses San Diego in a sudden, unexpected way. The people, the life he almost had there.

He thinks about replying for a month or so but he doesn't really have any news to add to his last letter. In the end he writes a short note about an exhibition he went to see at the Met recently, and a few lines about how cold the weather is turning. It feels inadequate but he sends it anyway before he can change his mind. 

Quite a while passes but Mark's reply arrives in the form of a Christmas card with a few sheets of scrawled-on notebook paper stuffed inside, and this is how Will begins an odd sort of long distance pen-pal relationship with his old college roommate.

They carry on like this, exchanging Christmas cards, birthday cards, letters a few times a year. Maybe a phone call around the holidays. When Will opens his first show in the City, Mark makes the trip all the way from the West Coast to be there and greets Will with a bear hug that makes his other friends raise their eyebrows. A few years after that, Will attends Mark's wedding with his new boyfriend, who Mark will greet in exactly the same way.

\--

There’s a new kid around the shelter, all of sixteen, small framed. He arrives bruised and bleeding from a nasty cut on his face one night, wild eyed and skittish. He won’t let anyone touch him and won’t give a name, so Will gives him some gauze and antiseptic to clean himself up and sits him down for a hot meal before leaving him to it. A lot of the kids that come through the shelter are the same, and there’s no point trying to force information out of them. At the end of the day, Will figures they’re not here to interrogate them, just to give them a safe place to sleep for the night. 

Will is sitting out on the step smoking, alone for once and idly watching the traffic go by at the end of the alley, when the kid tries to slip out the side door. He stops dead when he sees Will there and his face is so shocked it would be comical if it wasn’t so sad. 

Craning his neck to look up at the boy, Will takes a long drag of his cigarette while he ponders how to approach the situation. There’s tension in every line of this kid’s body, he’s strung tight as a piano wire and looks ready to run at the slightest hint of danger. 

Will exhales in a rush. “Needed some fresh air?” He gestures expansively to the alleyway, piled with trash, distinct odor of urine in the air. 

The boy doesn’t answer but his eyes dart quickly around, searching for an escape route. Will turns and faces front, eyes back on the traffic. 

“You’re not a prisoner here you know, you’re free to go whenever you want,” he keeps his voice carefully neutral. “Out the front door even, you don’t have to sneak out.”

Still, no answer. But the boy is still standing slightly behind him on the top step. Will casts his eyes skyward thoughtfully. 

“It’s going to rain tonight,” he says. “You have somewhere to sleep?”

Again, there is no answer and for a moment nothing happens at all, but then the kid takes one step down and slumps heavily to sit beside Will. His head is hanging, he looks exhausted and completely defeated, and Will’s heart just aches. 

“Can I have one of those?” 

The kid’s voice is startlingly young and Will mentally adjusts his age down a couple of years. Fourteen, he thinks, maybe. 

“How old are you?” Will asks. 

The boy looks at him, mouth set in a stubborn line, and for a moment they just stare each other down, before Will shrugs and hands the pack over because, honestly, who is he to judge?

He tries one more question. “You got a name?”

At this point, he’s not really expecting an answer so he almost misses when the kid says, in a voice barely above a whisper, “Adam.”

“Adam,” Will repeats, surprised. “Good to meet you Adam, I’m Will.”

Adam jerks his head in a motion which might be a nod. Will lights his cigarette for him and they sit in silence. When Will gets up to head back inside, Adam follows.

\--

He’s sitting in the park one day - he’s between classes but there’s not enough time to go home so he’s people-watching and sketching lazily, takeout cup of coffee on the ground by his feet. It’s early fall and the leaves have started to turn brilliant orange and yellow. In the back of his mind, he’s half waiting for the nightmares and black moods that usually come with the change in the weather, but so far he’s been doing okay. 

A shadow falls over his sketchbook and he looks up to see an older lady, maybe in her seventies, standing over him, smiling pleasantly. It takes him a second to realize it’s the same lady who’s been sitting on the park bench opposite him. She has a little white dog, and she’s been feeding the pigeons. He’s been drawing her. 

“...good morning?” he says, a little nervously. 

The woman grins even wider as she leans over his drawing, and her heavily made up face creases alarmingly. “Young man, that is excellent work. May I buy it?” 

Will is so startled by this question that all he can do is gape at her, “Uh…”

“How much would you like for it?” and she’s actually rooting around in her purse. 

Will panics. “Twenty dollars?” 

It comes out as a question and the old lady raises her eyebrows at him. “So little?”

“It’s just a rough sketch...” Will says, looking down at the sketchbook in his lap. Half a thought occurs to him then, and he looks back up through his eyelashes at her. “I could work it up for you, into a full drawing or...or a painting?”

“A painting!” Her eyes light up. “And what would you say is a fair price for such a thing?”

She’s still smiling at him, and she seems genuinely interested in the answer. He chews on his bottom lip for a moment, thinking. He has no idea what a fair price is, he’s never sold a painting in his life. 

“A hundred dollars,” he hedges. He tries to sound sure of himself even though it seems a truly ludicrous amount for something he was probably going to do anyway. 

“A deal,” she says, and she’s holding out her hand to him. “Mrs Margaret Emerson.”

“Will Byers,” he shakes her hand, still staring at her with wide eyes. 

“Pleasure. Do you have some correspondence information, Mr Byers?” 

There’s something curiously old-fashioned about the way she speaks. Will tears a page out of the back of his sketchbook and hurriedly scribbles down Jonathan’s address and phone number - a real apartment, in a more respectable neighbourhood. He hands her the paper and she glances at it briefly as she tucks it into her purse. 

“Are you a professional artist, Mr Byers?” she asks, holding out a small card to him. 

“A student,” he says as he takes the card. “At NYU”. 

“Most excellent,” she beams at him. “You will contact me when the painting is complete and we will arrange payment.” She gestures at the card she handed him, and he nods. 

“Excellent,” she says again, and gives him a wave as she leaves with her little white dog.

Will watches her walk away, dumbfounded. He looks down at the card in his hand. The paper is thick, embossed with her name. It looks expensive. He flips it over to read the back - an address at Central Park West. 

He thinks mildly that he should have asked for more money. 

\--

He’s manning the front desk at the shelter one evening. It’s late, and quiet, and he’s reading a battered volume of T.S. Eliot poems he borrowed from the library _._ He’s taking a literature class this semester, just for something different, and he’s enjoying it immensely. He can’t remember the last time he just sat and read, and these late shifts on the desk give him peaceful hours to lose himself in the books. 

Over the sound of the rain and the traffic outside, he hears a very faint knock at the door and looks up to see a haggard looking man tapping on the glass. Will gets up, grabbing a set of keys. They keep the doors locked after ten. 

He unlocks the door and sticks his head out. “I’m sorry sir, this is a youth shelter. There’s a place a few blocks over—” 

“Sorry, no,” the man interrupts. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

Will frowns, uneasy. As a rule, they don’t engage with people who show up looking for missing kids unless it’s the authorities. Too many have run away for good reasons, from terrible situations and worse people. “Sir, if your daughter is missing you should go to the police.”

“I’ve been to the police, they’re not doing anything.”

Will opens his mouth to speak but the man interrupts again.

“Please could you just look at her picture? _Please?_ ”

The man is looking at him with a pleading expression. As a rule...but then, Will has never been much one for rules. He trusts his own instincts more than rules. And if he can recognise anything, it’s grief. True desperation. Everything written all over this man’s face. 

It’s pouring with rain outside. 

Will moves back and opens the door wider, lets the man step into the lobby. He takes the picture, creased and wet from the rain, and studies it. It’s school picture. The girl is pretty, blonde, smiling. She looks happy. He’s never seen her before. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, as he hands the picture back and the other man’s face crumples. “How old is she?” he asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say. 

“Seventeen,” says the man. 

“When did she run away?” 

“She didn’t...I mean, she...about a year ago. She never came home from school. The police said--” the man breaks off, swallows hard. “She’s out there somewhere, if I could just find her…”

“I see,” says Will, because he does. He can hear the clock ticking down the hall. “We can keep the picture, if you like. Alert the authorities if she shows up.”

“Yes, thank you, thank you. Her name is Jessica Owens - my Jessie,” the man’s eyes light up with relief.

Will gets the feeling that he hasn’t encountered many people willing to offer the slightest bit of hope. He feels for the man, he really does. 

There is an awkward pause.

“I’m sorry sir, you shouldn’t really be here…” Will trails off, gesturing to the doorway, and the man nods reluctantly. 

As he turns to leave, he looks out into the rain. “I just hope she’s not out in this tonight.”

Will thinks it’s unlikely that this girl is out in anything at all, but he doesn’t let it show on his face. Then he remembers hiding from monsters in the dark. He thinks of El too, all of twelve, living in the woods in the dead of winter. 

“Kids are pretty resourceful, you might be surprised,” he says, and the man _does_ look surprised. “I’m sure she’s fine, wherever she is.”

Will watches the man’s receding form until he disappears into the rain before sighing heavily and locking the door. Looking down at the photo of Jessica Owens’ smiling face again, he knows full well she is probably _not_ fine but really, what else is there to say? 

\--

He heads to the apartment on Central Park West on a cold Saturday afternoon. It’s taken him over a month to get around to finishing the painting, trying to fit it around midterms and volunteer work, but Mrs Emerson hadn’t seemed unhappy about the wait when he’d phoned her. 

She opens the door and smiles widely at him and her face is almost cartoonishly made up, just like the first time he’d seen her. The first thing Will notices as she ushers him inside is the view. The second is the collection of art on the walls. The third is the quintet of old ladies sitting over a porcelain tea service, peering at him owlishly. 

“Ladies,” crows Mrs Emerson. “This is William Byers.”

There is a twittering of polite ‘hellos’ as she takes her seat again. She looks up at him and enunciates in her precise, old fashioned manner. 

“Young Mr Byers is a student at New York University, and he has come to bring a painting I commissioned from him.”

Another round of indecipherable twittering, and Will feels suddenly like he’s sweating, incredibly self conscious. He manages to twist his face into something he feels may resemble a smile, fumbling slightly as he unwraps the canvas from the old pillowcase he’s placed it in to protect it (and now feels embarrassed about). 

He turns the canvas toward the assembled company, holding it out at waist height so they can see, and the old ladies are immediately beside themselves with delight. Will can feel the blush creeping up his neck and he feels oddly pleased, flattered. 

The painting depicts a very gentle scene - Mrs Emerson sitting in the dappled morning sunlight, with her little white dog beside her. He’s chosen to pick her out in stark relief, with the world around her painted more loosely, almost impressionistic. Not his usual style, but he’d taken a gamble. It seems to have paid off. 

At once, he is inundated with questions and almost forty minutes later as he’s being escorted out, a hundred dollars richer and full of cake, he feels a little like he’s been involved in some kind of hit-and-run incident. 

“There’s something about you, William,” says Mrs Emerson, patting him on the arm as she sees him out the door. “I’ve got my eye on you. I know talent when I see it.” 

In five years, she will sponsor his first show. She’ll give a toast about how she’d first noticed him, little more than a boy, glancing at her repeatedly as he sketched in the park. How she’d gone over to him out of curiosity. 

For now, it’s through her that he picks up a steady side-gig taking commissions from wealthy Manhattan socialites, doing portraits of their dogs and their cats and, on one memorable occasion, a python. It means he can stop taking so much money from Jonathan, he can buy food instead of getting by on whatever he can scrounge at school or the shelter. 

If he saved he could buy a bus ticket home, although he doesn’t. 

\--

Will starts an art group for the kids at the shelter, just to give them something to do in the evenings other than smoke or do their laundry. He’s not really doing it with a particular aim in mind, he just thinks it’ll be fun. 

He steals a lot of stuff from school. Frank-the-ceramics-teacher eyeballs him as he unloads the week’s third huge box of mysteriously ‘donated’, gently-used art supplies, but doesn’t call him out on it. What he can’t pilfer from his classes, he buys with his rich-lady-pet-portrait cash. 

He genuinely does not expect the kids to get into it the way they do. Street kids are tough as old boots, mouthy and hostile by nature, even the ones who gravitate toward Will. They have to be to survive. They have attitude about anything and everything, but they freaking _love_ messing around with dollar store paint and crayons. 

Will sees a lot of Adam that summer. He’s become a regular at the shelter, part of the ever-changing group of kids hanging around. He’s also one of the kids who gets really into the art stuff. He’s still not much of a talker, but Will teases little bits of information out of him here and there over various art activities. He’s from New Jersey. He likes the Mets. He won’t talk about why he ran away, or what he ran away from. Any question in that direction makes him clam up and, more often than not, disappear for a few weeks. Will learns to avoid the subject. 

He tends to wear a heavy sweater, even in the stifling summer heat, which is Will’s first clue. He starts to keep a closer eye, and it’s one afternoon at the art table when Adam reaches up his sleeve to scratch his arm that Will first catches sight of the track marks on his wrist. 

He’s not the first kid to come in here with marks like that. He’s the youngest Will has seen though. 

He catches him sitting on the step, smoking. 

“What are you using?” he asks, and holds his hands up when Adam’s head snaps round, wild eyed. “No judgement here, okay? I just want to know.”

Adam shrugs and grumbles, scowling at the floor. Will sighs heavily. 

“We can get you help, you know.”

Adam stands in a sudden, jerky movement and Will holds his hands up again, conciliatory. “When you’re ready, okay? No judgement. But you can come to me, when you need to.” 

The younger boy gives a stiff nod and makes to walk back into the shelter. Will catches his arm as he passes. 

“You can’t come in here high. I mean it.” Will’s voice is hard. This is one rule that doesn’t bend. It’s for the safety of all the kids. Adam tries to pull away but Will hangs on - a loose grip. Just enough to keep his attention. 

“I will be here when you need me,” he enunciates each word slowly and firmly, maintaining eye contact. “I mean that too.” 

There’s a still moment when Will thinks that Adam might speak, but he only nods again and pulls away. Will lets him go. He doesn’t see him for the rest of the night, and when he comes back the next day, Adam is gone. 

He doesn’t see the boy for several weeks but the next time he appears, Will presses two pamphlets into his hands. A needle exchange programme nearby, and a free clinic offering HIV testing. 

A month passes and he doesn’t see Adam again. Late one night, he frets about it over stale coffee in a truly awful diner. 

“It wasn’t enough,” he says. He’s chewed his thumbnail so much it’s started to bleed.

“Can’t help someone unless they want it,” says Gary, not unkindly. It doesn’t make Will feel any better. 

\--

Dustin does end up coming for a visit. Will is speaking to him over Jonathan’s phone one evening, and this time he doesn’t put the phone down when Dustin delicately suggests maybe possibly coming over Spring Break. 

They agree he’ll drive down for four days - New York City isn’t a million miles from where Dustin is at Penn State - and they’ll both stay at Jonathan and Nancy’s for the duration. Somehow Will doesn’t think his place - currently without power for the second time this month - is suitable for hosting guests. 

It’ll be cramped, and Will is evasive with his reasoning when asked (“Where the hell do you live, some crack den?”) but Dustin doesn’t push the subject, and Jonathan and Nancy both seem pleased that he’s agreed to spend time with his friend - he’s so far resisted any and all offers of visitors - so he doesn’t feel too bad about imposing on them. 

Dustin arrives on a motorcycle of all things, and Will only has time to get out “Where did _that_ come from?” before he’s being tackled nearly off his feet. They both stagger sideways a few steps, laughing, as they hug tightly, and Will is hit forcefully by how much he’s missed his friend. 

It’s a bit of a whirlwind visit - Dustin hasn’t changed at all, he talks a mile a minute about everything from his studies to his part-time job to his mom back home. It’s his first visit to the city so Will takes him to the Natural History Museum and the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. They do all the touristy things that Will himself has neglected to do in the time he’s been living here, and it’s a lot of fun. 

They stay up late one night, talking deep into the small hours about Will’s work at the shelter, how it’s seemingly taken up all his free time. Dustin asks if he’s planning on going home over the summer. Will ignores the question and changes the subject, and Dustin doesn’t ask again.

As he’s getting ready to leave, Dustin puts a hand on Will’s shoulder, uncharacteristically somber. 

“It’s really great to see you doing so well. We were all worried for a while.” 

Will doesn’t know how to respond to that so he ducks his head and brings a hand to grip Dustin’s arm for a moment before gently shrugging him off. 

They part ways with another tight hug and a promise to get together again soon, which Will fully intends to keep. He suddenly misses all his old friends fiercely, misses just sitting around with them, talking and laughing. He thinks achingly of D&D sessions in Mike’s basement, the whole Party crammed together in Lucas’ car on the way to get milkshakes, mornings at the breakfast table with his whole family around him. 

Everything he’d tried so hard to believe he didn’t need. Will shakes his head and laughs a little at himself. 

\--

The next time Adam shows up, he doesn’t come into the shelter. He’s waiting outside in the alleyway, and he scares the crap out of Will when he steps out from the shadows as Will is lighting a cigarette. 

He’s desperately thin, and pale, and it hurts Will almost physically to see him. He doesn’t speak, and his eyes are big as dinner plates as he reaches up with shaking hands to pull his bottom lip down so Will can see the sores inside his mouth. 

Will leans forward a little to look and takes a deep, measured breath, schooling his features. 

“Okay,” he says, more calmly than he feels. “Wait here.” 

Will drops his cigarette to the ground, and darts back inside. Running down the hall, he pokes his head into the office and tells the shelter manager, Shelly, that he’s going out for a while. She raises an eyebrow at him but he doesn’t wait for a response, jogs back down the hall and out the side door. 

He fills out the form at the clinic. Sits beside Adam while they explain the process and draw some blood. This is the first time Will has sat with someone at the HIV clinic, but it won’t be the last. 

There’ll be more shelter kids, and colleagues, and friends. Once, a lover - the results are mercifully negative but the fear lingers for a long time. He’ll always continue his work with at-risk youth, and once a year he’ll come to be tested himself, just to be safe. 

For now, all he can do is buy Adam dinner and promise to accompany him to collect his results in two weeks.

Two weeks pass, then three, then four. Adam never reappears. Will takes to walking the neighbourhood around the shelter, tells himself he’s not looking for Adam even though he is. 

\--

Will’s twentieth birthday comes and goes. He allows Jonathan and Nancy to take him out for dinner, and when he arrives at their apartment his mother and Hopper are waiting there to surprise him. He shocks himself by bursting into tears as his mom wraps him in her arms.

It’s a nice dinner, the five of them linger at the restaurant talking about everything and nothing before heading back to the apartment for cake. They’ve brought gifts too, including a scarf from El in a muted yellow wool. She’s taken up crochet, he’s informed. She made it herself. 

He’s got that old trick-of-the-mind feeling again as he runs a thumb over the yarn, almost warm to the touch, not-quite-there scent of lavender. He shakes it off. 

The next day, he heads into the city with his mom and Hopper, walks them round some tourist spots, shows them a bit of NYU. Hopper is quiet for most of the day and Will remembers with force that Hop used to be a cop here, before his daughter died. 

His mom asks to see his apartment and he shoots a frantic look at Hopper over her head when she’s not looking. The older man reads it well, checks his watch and tells her they need to get going. Gives Will a look that clearly means he’s got some explaining to do at some point. 

\--

He’s standing in line at a coffee cart one afternoon when he hears his name being called. Looking over his shoulder, he sees Frank walking up the street toward him. Will is long done with his ceramics class, but he sees a lot of Frank at the shelter and they’ve become friendly. 

They’re heading in the same general direction, so when they both have coffee they walk together. The weather is turning cold again, and Will is grateful for the yellow scarf around his neck. 

“Heard you took that kid to get tested,” says Frank, breaking into a companionable silence. 

“Yeah.” Will’s not sure why he’s bringing it up. 

“He ever come back to get the results?” 

Will takes a gulp of coffee to avoid answering, scalding his throat. He shakes his head and looks down, burying his chin in his scarf. 

“That why you’ve been roaming the streets looking for him?” 

“I haven’t—” Will starts to deny but then stops because, really, what’s the point. Frank’s got his number. Will just shrugs. Frank sighs. 

“Do you remember when I told you not to get too involved in their lives?” Frank asks. “This is getting too involved.” 

“Taking him to the clinic isn’t—”

“I’m not talking about the clinic,” Frank cuts him off. “That was the right thing to do. But the point where you’re wandering around the city at all hours looking for him is the point where you take a step back. You’re not doing yourself any good.” 

“It’s not about me.” 

“It is.” Frank stops and puts a hand on his shoulder, gripping lightly as Will turns to face him. “You want to help and that’s great. But you’re no good to anyone if you’re burning out. And you will if you carry on like this.” 

They walk on in silence and Will turns this over in his mind. When they reach Frank’s destination and he says goodbye and starts up the steps of the building, pausing before he reaches the top and turning back to Will. 

“Do me a favor Will, don’t be a martyr. Don’t isolate yourself.” 

He goes inside. Will’s not sure what he means. 

\--

The cops show up at the shelter, with a photograph. There’s a kid been mowed down by a bus, and he had the shelter information in his pocket. 

It’s Adam. 

Will tells them everything he knows, which isn’t much. A first name, if it’s even his real name. Where he was from. It’s probably not enough to track down any family. 

“Was it suicide?” Will blurts as the cops are leaving. One of them shrugs. 

“Could have been. Could also have just been an accident. Just one of those things.” and the cop gives a ‘what can you do’ shrug. 

“Just one of those things,” Will repeats, voice flat, and he’s angry then. So angry. At the universe, at Adam, at himself. At the useless, pointless waste.

He goes to the bathroom and throws up. Gary finds him there and tells him to finish up for the day. He avoids making eye contact with anyone as he leaves. He doesn’t want to see the knowing look in his colleagues eyes - _got attached, what did he expect_ \- and he doesn’t want to lose it in front of the kids. 

He’s going to go home and crawl into bed but then he remembers Frank’s words. He has a moment of indecision, standing in the street as people stream around him, going about their business like a whole life hasn’t just been extinguished. 

He turns around and heads for the subway, and forty-five minutes later he’s sitting slumped on the sofa as his brother picks out a movie and Nancy orders Chinese food. 

It’s a warm, dimly lit evening. Comfortable and comforting. He talks it out with them. He doesn’t go into detail, he can’t, but he gives them the bare bones in fits and starts. He falls asleep on the couch, and Nancy gives him coffee and breakfast the next morning before sending him on his way with leftovers and a hug. 

His heart still feels incredibly heavy. He regrets so many things - he will spend weeks replaying every interaction, every decision. Everything he didn’t do, or could have done better. 

But the ache in his chest will fade. He will carry this for a long time, but in the end it becomes just another thing to carry. He doesn’t sink.

The world is not ending today. 

\--

In the darkest hour of the night Will wakes suddenly, startled by a sharp stab of instinct he hasn’t felt in years. 

Blinking in the dark, for a moment he thinks he is at home in his mother’s house and El is sleeping in the next room, but the ever present din of traffic and city-noise filters into his consciousness and he knows he is not.

He hauls himself staggering out of bed, crosses the room, is already reaching for the doorknob by the time the faint knock comes. He fumbles with his many deadbolts, and his hands are shaking. He flings the door wide and there is El, standing in front of him, looking at him with huge sad eyes.

Sleep is still clinging to him and he feels half a second behind his own body. He’s got his arms around her before he even knows he’s moved, and his heart is singing even as it breaks because he has not seen her in almost three years, and he feels suddenly warmer, and lighter. Complete. Like he’s found something he hadn’t quite realized he was missing until this moment. 

But she’s holding on to him like he’s the only thing keeping her upright and her despair is almost a physical entity, he can feel it so thick in the air around them. It’s overwhelming.

She’s drifting, lost, as he once was. As he maneuvers her inside his studio, still with his arms around her, he knows what he owes her. He’ll do for her what she once did for him. He can do that much. 

_fin_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up, El.


	2. El

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The bulk of this chapter was written before s3 premiered, so this is no longer canon compliant but we're rolling with it. 
> 
> Warnings: As before, there is nothing explicit, but the vaguest possible mentions of suicide/suicidal thoughts.

  
  
  


El feels the change in Will like the turn of the season.

Subtle at first, almost nothing. One bright morning she wakes up and the world seems a little colder, for no reason she can explain.

They are stretched thin over the vast distance, the thread connecting them taut enough to snap, but she can still feel him, faintly, very far away. 

She’s felt strange since he left. She’s getting on, of course. She has followed Mike to Chicago - Mike has started a degree in electrical engineering and she’s taking some classes, trying to figure out what she likes. Everything is scary and exciting at the same time and Mike is the bright center of her universe and they are starting the next chapter of their lives together. It’s everything she’s worked for, everything she’s wanted, but she’s a little off balance, a little unmoored. 

El has spent so long tethering Will to the world, she never realized he was also tethering her. She feels his absence like a gaping wound.

She gets letters and without looking at the scrawl on the envelope, she knows they are from Will. She can feel some trace of him on the paper, like sense memory, like the touch of his hand on hers. _I miss you_ , the letters all say, even when they don’t. _I love you_. 

She can’t account for what seems off about Will, they don’t really talk on the phone - long distance is too expensive - but his letters are chatty, bright. She thinks he is well, knows she would know for certain if he wasn’t. She has to assume that whatever this is, it will pass. She is confident that when it does, she’ll feel more herself too. 

They are like this – they ebb and flow together like the tides.

\--

She wakes gasping in the night and the nightmares are not hers. Chest heaving, hands clutching at her throat, feeling of choking, trying to claw something out. No memory she has, no horror she’s ever conjured, has ever felt like this.

_Nothing_ , she says when Mike wakes with her, asks what’s wrong. He lets it go, because she’ll tell him when she’s ready, because she always does. 

But not this time. 

_Nothing_ , she says the third time it happens, and the tenth, and the nineteenth, and each time his face shutters a little more. She can feel him stewing, worry mixed with hurt, watches him watching her, lies next to him in the dark while he is tense, not sleeping, waiting. 

_It’s nothing_ she says and doesn’t look him in the eye, because she promised this to Will.

\--

The novelty of Chicago wears off quickly. 

Once the thrill of being out here with Mike - just the two of them, together, _finally_ \- has worn off, El is left with the hard reality that they really are alone out here. 

Not _alone_ alone. She knows Hop is just a few hours away and she can call if she needs - but the little cocoon she’s had around her since she was twelve is suddenly gone. Mike is buried under schoolwork already and El’s class load is nothing like as full as his, so she is often by herself. El’s never minded her own company, exactly, but she’s sometimes lonely all the same.

She doesn’t know how to go about meeting people or finding people to spend time with - she never really picked up any new friends in Hawkins, outside of the Party. She’s not easy with people. She thinks now she never will be. 

She walks around their neighbourhood and then ventures further afield into the city. Chicago still carries a kind of wistfulness for her, a bittersweet undercurrent of _what if_. El sometimes thinks she sees Kali in the crowd, or just turning a corner, but it’s never her. Logically, she knows her sister probably left the city after that night and never came back. Still…

El doesn’t try to look for Kali. If she knows anything at all, it’s that some things are better left alone. 

And always, Will hovers on the edge of her thoughts. She doesn’t check up on him either. It’s an awfully long way and she’s out of practise. 

Besides, she knows how much he wants to do this on his own, remembers the way he gripped her hand and the desperate look in his eyes. She knows, in her _soul_. She promised.

\--

El is sitting in a cafe before class one afternoon. Her half-drunk black coffee has gone cold at her elbow as she ponders her textbook, tapping the pen absently against the page.

She hears Mike’s soft ‘hey’ half a second before his hands land on her shoulders, squeezing lightly. He always announces himself before touching her. He never lets it be a surprise, never sneaks up on her.

“What are you doing here?” She tips her head slightly as he leans down to press a kiss to the side of her neck. 

“Saw you through the window,” he murmurs next to her ear, and a delicious little shiver runs down her spine. “Thought I’d say ‘hi’.” 

El turns her head and Mike catches her mouth, sighing as he kisses her, slow and easy. When they separate, she can’t help the smile that spreads over her face as she looks up at him. He smiles back, bumping her nose with his a little before coming around the table and dropping heavily into the seat opposite her. 

They pass a few minutes chatting about their respective days, until El has to bring a hand to her mouth to cover a sudden, enormous yawn. 

Mike tilts his head to one side. “Did you sleep last night?” 

“A little,” says El, shuffling through the highlighters spread on the table. There’s a long moment where neither of them speaks. 

“El, what’s going on with you?” 

His voice is quiet and when she looks up at him he’s frowning slightly, full of concern. 

His eyes are so soft, his expression pinched with worry. El’s heart gives a painful twist and she really thinks for a moment about telling him everything. _But…_

She shakes her head and waves a hand dismissively. “Nothing, I told you.”

The effect is immediate. His face shutters and he sits a little straighter, losing his relaxed posture. He looks for a moment like he’s going to say something, jaw working, but then glances around them and seems to think better of it. 

“I gotta get to class,” he says finally, scooping up his backpack and standing up. “I’ll see you at home.”

He leans down and pecks her cheek, but the kiss is perfunctory and he doesn’t look back at her as he walks out of the coffee shop. El watches him go and sighs heavily, rubbing her tired eyes. 

.

She’s in a bad mood by the time she gets home, tired and hungry on top of the odd heaviness that seems to always sit on her chest these days, and her whole body reacts to the delicious smell that assaults her as she opens the front door to her apartment. 

Dropping her bag by the door, she slips off her shoes and walks through to the kitchen just as Mike is pulling what looks like lasagne out of the oven. 

“You cooked?” She can’t keep the surprise out of her voice. They are both lazy when it comes to food, and it’s not unusual for their mid-week dinners to consist of sandwiches.

“Don’t get too excited,” Mike says wryly, pulling plates out of the cupboard. “The sauce is out of a jar.” 

He looks at her and his eyes are still a little distant, but his smile is warm. It’s a peace offering, as much as she’s going to get out of him, so when he reaches for her she goes to him and tucks herself under his arm.

“We’ll make a house husband of you yet, Wheeler.” 

“I’ve always wanted to be a kept man,” he says, and kisses her forehead. 

\--

El and Mike don’t stay under the same roof in Hawkins over the Christmas break - El goes home to Hop and Joyce, Mike to his parents. They still see each other every day but El feels strangely bereft - she’s become used to Mike’s constant presence, and she finds her bed feels empty without him beside her. 

It’s made worse by the fact that Will has chosen to stay in California over Christmas. She’s been looking forward to seeing him. More than that, she’s almost been clinging to the idea - counting the days until she could see him, touch him, assure herself that he’s okay. Until she could draw strength from him again.

The nightmares have been taking their toll. 

Will is struggling, she knows, but what can she do when he insists in every letter that he’s fine? She’s even tried reaching him on the phone a few times but he’s always out. She might suspect him of dodging her calls if it didn’t go against everything she knows about him. 

He leaves a voicemail on Christmas Eve, and he sounds cheerful enough. She doesn’t know, she’s never been good with nuance, but Joyce seems satisfied so El supposes she should be too.

If he tells her he’s fine, if he says he’s handling it, she has to trust him. 

She spends Christmas in the warm embrace of her family, and tries to ignore the empty space where her brother should be.

\--

The night they return to Chicago, El wakes in the dark. Not from a nightmare, but quietly.

She lies still for a moment.. It’s late, well after midnight, and Mike is snoring beside her. There is nothing out of the ordinary that might have woken her, just one thought whispering persistently over her consciousness. 

_Will._

She feels cold. Something is terribly, terribly wrong. 

Easing out of bed, desperate not to wake Mike, she creeps down the hall into the bathroom.

Turning the shower on, she cringes at the groan of their ancient plumbing and waits. The pipes quiet, and when there is no movement from down the hall she shuts the bathroom door carefully behind her. 

Sitting in the tub under the warm spray, eyes closed and knees drawn up to her chest, she slips silently into the Void. 

It’s been a long time since she’s been in the Void, years, but it’s as easy and familiar as pulling on an old pair of sneakers. 

She stands still for a moment, eyes closed, grounding herself in the water under her feet - not hot, not cold, not anything. She breathes the scentless air, lets the silence settle thick around her. She waits for the tiny pull in her gut, the _knowing_. Then, she opens her eyes and begins to walk.

She walks for a long time, the only sound the gentle splash under her bare feet. Eventually, this is overtaken by something louder - the crashing of waves. 

She goes toward the sound and a figure comes into view, facing away from her. _Will_. As she gets closer she can see he’s sitting on sand. He must be on the beach, she thinks, she can’t see the ocean but the sound of the waves is louder than ever. 

It’s dark. He’s sitting perfectly still, facing out in what she presumes is the direction of the water. There is a terrible, blank expression on his face. She can _feel_ him, the dark abyss inside him, and suddenly she just _knows_ what it is he’s thinking of doing.

_No_. 

She sinks to her knees in the sand behind him and places her hand gently between his shoulder blades. The muscles in Will’s back twitch slightly under her touch and his breath catches, but he gives no other indication that he knows she’s there. 

“Will?” she says, and her voice sounds far away in her own ears, swallowed by the emptiness around her. He doesn’t answer, gives no sign that he’s heard. 

She closes her eyes and tries to feel into their connection, tries to push along that thread all the love and warmth she can summon. Golden summer days and the smell of fresh cut grass. Twinkling lights at Christmas. The feel of his hand in hers, fingers tightly entwined. 

She stays with him all through the night, thoughts a constant loop of _no, no, don’t, no, I love you, don’t, no, no..._ always reaching out, stretching towards him. 

She doesn’t know if he knows she’s there with him, but he doesn’t move until the light around him starts to change as the sun rises, and her hand slips from his back as he stands stiffly. He stares at some unseen point on the horizon for a moment, before turning and walking away in the opposite direction of the sound of the water, leaving her alone in the sand.

El breathes. They’ve made it through the night, at least. 

.

“El, are you okay?”

She is jolted back into her body by Mike pulling the shower curtain aside. The spray has turned icy, all the hot water long used up, and she blinks up at him, dazed. 

She tries to speak and finds she can’t. Her face is numb. 

“Jesus Christ.” Mike reaches over her head to turn off the shower, and the spray lands on his arm in the process. “ _Shit._ ” 

His hands are under her arms as he leans down and hauls her to her feet. Her limbs feel heavy, oddly stiff, and she can’t coordinate her movements as she half steps, half falls out of the tub. Mike only just manages to keep her upright, hands slipping against her wet skin. 

He gets her steady on her feet and then darts quickly into the hall. As she stands dripping onto the tiled floor, she catches sight of herself in the bathroom mirror - lips tinged blue from cold, wet hair plastered against her face, veins standing in sharp relief under white skin. 

There’s blood under her nose, and trickling a thin line from her ear. She touches her fingers to it with a kind of detached fascination. It’s been so long...

Then Mike is back, wrapping what she dimly registers as his bathrobe around her, pulling her tight into his chest, rubbing her back and arms. 

She rests her head against him and she can feel his heart pounding under his ribs, the way his hands are shaking as he pushes her dripping hair out of her eyes and tries to tilt her face up to look at him.

“Jesus,” he says again. “Are you okay?”

El blinks up at him and her vision is blurred, his face swimming oddly. Her thoughts come sluggishly, and it takes her a long moment to register what he’s saying to her. 

“Yes,” she says slowly. “Yes, I’m okay.” She pulls gently out of his arms, pulling the robe tighter around her, and walks out. It feels strange, like she’s outside of her own body.

He follows behind her as she pads back down the hall to their bedroom. 

“El, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she says, absently pulling clothes out of a drawer, not looking at what they are. 

“It’s not nothing,” Mike is in the doorway. She ignores him. “El, are you listening? This is not nothing.”

“You don’t need to worry”

“It’s too late for that.” He hesitates. “Is it the Upside Down?”

“What? No, of course not.” She looks up at him, frowning. “Mike, everything is fine. I’m fine.” 

She says this in as soothing a voice as she can, hoping it will be enough to get him to drop the subject like every time before. 

Instead, he snorts disbelievingly. “You’re a lot of things right now, but ‘fine’ isn’t one of them.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Come on - the nightmares, the not sleeping, now _this_?” he gestures to her, pale and bloody, still wrapped in his bathrobe. “This is not normal behaviour.”

She’s still hazy and in her fragile, sleep-deprived state, the comment stings unexpectedly. “Well, I'm so sorry I'm not _normal_ enough for you—”

“Stop it,” he cuts her off, voice sharp as glass. “That’s not what I’m saying and you know it.”

El can feel a kind of pressure building as she pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, drawing a deep breath through her nose. “Mike—”

“I don’t understand why you won’t talk to me.”

“I’m talking to you now—” she says at the same time that Mike says “El, you are _scaring_ me—”

“Mike, will you just _back off_ ,” she bursts out before she can stop herself. “Just back off and leave me alone!” 

She regrets it immediately, clapping a hand to her mouth, but the damage is done. She’s never seen him look so wounded. 

They stare at each other and the few steps between them suddenly seem like a chasm, wide and uncrossable.

“Mike—” she starts, but he turns stiffly and walks out, leaving her standing alone by the bed. A moment later, she hears the plumbing groan as the shower turns back on. _It’ll be cold_ , she thinks, semi-hysterical. 

By the time he’s done in the bathroom, she’s dressed. She hears him moving around in the bedroom as she stands in the kitchen, still chilled to the bone, watching the slow trickle of the coffee pot. When he comes into the kitchen, hair damp and skin flush with cold, he takes the mug she offers silently. 

They don’t talk about it, that morning or any other. 

He doesn’t ask her what’s wrong again.

\--

She keeps a very close eye on Will. Until she’s sure she doesn’t need to intervene.

\--

“Will’s transferred to NYU,” says Mike as he hangs up the phone, his features awash with confusion. “He moved in with Jonathan a few weeks ago.”

“Oh,” says El, voice carefully neutral.

There is a heavy silence. Then, “did you know?”

“No.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.”

She doesn’t look up from the book in her lap. He doesn’t say anything else but she feels his eyes on her for a long time. 

\--

A letter arrives from Will, long and rambling, almost illegible in places where the ink is smeared with what El strongly suspects are tearstains. 

It hurts her more than she can say to finally know exactly how much he’s been suffering. To know that he’s been lying to her about it. To know she’s been lying for him when she could have been helping him, when they all could have been helping him. 

She can’t bring herself to be mad at him. 

She writes back. She has to start over several times - frustrated, she doesn’t have the words, she never has the words and it’s _infuriating_ \- but she tells him she loves him. She misses him.

She tells him there’s nothing he could ever do that would make her turn her back on him.

\--

The nightmares get better, after this. 

Things with Mike don’t.

\--

Lucas and Max are both less volatile and less bound together than Mike and El, and they drift apart and back together again in more or less predictable patterns. When Max is being inaccessible or Lucas is being pig-headed, they get sick of each other and decide that some distance is best. When they get over themselves, they seek each other out and have another period of stability. Neither of them seems particularly bothered by their separations, just confident that they'll find their way back to each other when the time is right.

The only real hiccup comes when Lucas drops out of college after freshman year and joins the army. He does this without telling anyone, and Max hits the roof.

She shows up on El and Mike’s doorstep three days later.

Mike makes himself scarce as soon as Max arrives - he doesn't even say goodbye, El just hears the click of the door as he leaves. Probably gone to the library - El knows from experience he'll stay until it closes before creeping home, hoping he's missed the worst of the fallout. He's joked to her before that ‘Max and Lucas drama’ is great for his GPA.

This seems no different to the other times at first. Max is angry and hurt by Lucas not including her in this, a decision that will affect them both if they decide to stay together.

Max starts by spending several hours pacing the living room, yelling in El's general direction while El sits on the sofa and makes sympathetic noises at appropriate times. El has learned that Max needs to get the anger out of her system first in order to consider things rationally - she is a lot like Mike in this regard, although El knows better than to say _that_ out loud to either of them.

When the rage has been expended, a period of tearful recriminations follows. At this stage El's job is to provide chocolate and more sympathetic noises.

Usually this is the end - Max gets her frustrations out, cools down a little, drinks wine a lot, and then goes back to her life. This time, though, the crying is followed by an uncharacteristically serious mood. 

“How could he not talk to me about this? This is huge, _life changing_ ,” Max says, picking at her fingernail. “Do I just not figure into his plans for the future at all?” 

She seems like she’s about to start crying again and El thinks carefully before she speaks, drawing on a half-remembered conversation with Will from years ago. 

“Lucas always does what he thinks is the right thing,” she starts slowly. “He’s not so good at thinking about what happens when he’s _done_ what he thinks is the right thing.” 

“There’s a _war,_ he could get sent over there and _die.”_ Max’s voice is shaking.

El can’t argue. She sighs and shrugs, “Lucas stood between me and the Demogorgon with nothing but a slingshot,” she says, and Max laughs through her tears. “I think I like his chances.” 

.

Max stays a few more days and despite the circumstances, El enjoys having her there immensely. She’s missed Max, she’s missed her company and easy conversation. El laughs more in those few days than she feels like she has in months.

The night before Max leaves, they’re on the couch watching a movie. Mike is out - the library again - and Max keeps shooting furtive looks at El, fidgeting and chewing her lip. 

“What?” El finally asks, when she can no longer pretend not to notice.

Max seems to hesitate before she speaks, unusual for her. 

“Are you and Mike okay?” she asks. 

“Of course,” El answers automatically, because she and Mike are always okay. 

But Max is still looking at her, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She sounds sure but she feels uneasy. “Why?”

“You guys just seem…” Max trails off, shakes her head. “I don’t know. Weird. Tense.” 

They stare at each other and El thinks about the nightmares, the sleepless nights. She thinks about lying to Mike about Will, the first time ever. She thinks about the fight they had.

She thinks about the way Mike has started to stay out late at the library, studying. How she’s started staying up late reading after Mike goes to bed, falling asleep on the couch and waking to the sound of him walking out the door the next morning. How they sometimes go days without speaking.

“Everything is fine,” says El. She feels flustered by the conversation. “Watch the movie.”

\--

El is unsettled for days after Max leaves. The thought that she and Mike have been drifting, to the point where it’s evident to someone outside their relationship...it’s startling. It makes her feel strange, like her skin is too tight. 

She doesn’t know what to do to fix it. She’s never been good at finding the right words and she feels almost afraid to talk about this, like speaking it aloud would make it real, give it teeth. Like it would mean they really had a problem. And they can’t have a problem. It’s Mike, it’s _her and Mike_. They’re perfect, a done deal. A sure thing. 

But there's space between them now that wasn’t there before. Now that she’s aware of it, she can’t go back to ignoring it. 

One night she’s lying in bed staring at a crack of moonlight slowly inching its way across the ceiling. Mike is lying on his side with his back to her, snoring softly, and all of a sudden it’s too much. 

El rolls toward Mike and wraps herself around him. She feels him tense slightly as he wakes but then he relaxes, grips her hand tightly where it is resting around his middle. 

“I love you,” she whispers, voice muffled into his shoulder. “I love you.” 

He presses the back of her hand to his lips briefly. “I love you, too.” 

They don’t speak again, and soon Mike’s breathing evens out again in sleep. His grip on her hand doesn’t loosen. El feels a sudden, overwhelming affection for him - a surge of love and want and need and every emotion she has that is tangled together with his _Mike-ness_ \- as she presses her face into the warmth of his back and breathes him in. She falls asleep like this, more secure than she’s felt in months. 

.

In the morning, they talk. Finally. 

El explains, about Will, about everything. 

“I wish you’d told me,” Mike’s voice is oddly flat. He’s staring at the ground, face inscrutable. “I thought I was losing you.” 

“No,” El reaches over to grip his hand, suddenly desperate. “Never. I promise.”

\--

Things are better after this, but El still feels a jarring sort of dissonance. 

She and Mike go about their daily routines, and they speak again, they spend time together - cooking and eating together, watching TV, going to bed together - but it feels a little forced, like their edges don’t fit together quite as neatly as they did before. 

So she goes out of her way to accommodate him. Where she’s been shutting him out for so long, she bares herself to him completely. She has no secrets, she shares every thought, every feeling with him. 

She can see that Mike is making an effort as well - he no longer studies at the library if he can help it, instead bringing piles of books home with him. He works on the couch, with her feet in his lap, one hand holding the pages of his book open and one hand resting absent-mindedly on her ankle. 

He talks to her, too. When she’s lying in his arms in the dark, he whispers against her neck how he loves her, how afraid he is of losing her, how she’s the only thing in this world that matters. 

She loves him fiercely in these moments, but more than that, she loves the way he makes her feel. Safe, and important, and cherished. She feels like that space between them is closing, mending. Like things are getting back to how they were before, how they should be. 

If something about it still feels a little hollow, she ignores it.

\--

Time passes. The dust settles.

\--

El doesn’t like to be home alone anymore. Where their little apartment had once seemed peaceful, the quiet is too much for her now. 

It’s better now that Mike comes home to study, but she only goes to college part time so she’s at a loose end when he’s in class. She sits in coffee shops a lot, or the library. Sometimes, if the weather is nice, she waits outside whatever building he’s in until he’s finished.

His class schedule is taped to their refrigerator and El comes to rely on it. She doesn’t like it when she has to be away from Mike, but it’s comforting to know when they’ll be apart, how long for, and when he’ll be back. It reminds her of being in the cabin with Hopper, although Mike is better about sticking to the routine than Hop ever was. 

He’s so rarely late that she gets upset when he is. She doesn’t try to check up on him in the Void - after he’d found her in the bathtub, she’d been ill and weak for days, plagued by migraines and frequent, spontaneous nosebleeds. She’d frightened Mike so badly that morning that he’d demanded she never go back into the Void unless she was sure it was an absolute, life-or-death emergency. 

Her rational brain knows that Mike being thirty minutes late probably doesn’t qualify, but as the clock ticks toward the forty-five minute mark, she’s seriously considering it. _He never has to know_...she quashes the thought immediately, guiltily. No more secrets, they’d said. She had promised, and she meant it. 

She’s so focussed on her moral dilemma that she nearly jumps out of her skin when she hears Mike’s key in the door. He calls her name as he makes his way through the apartment, appearing in the doorway to the kitchen, where she’s been standing drumming her fingers on the counter in agitation for the past half hour. 

“Where have you been?” she says, more sharply than she’d intended, and she can see the look of surprise on his face. 

He checks his watch and grimaces. “Shit, I'm sorry.”

“Where were you?” she asks again, quieter, hugging her arms around herself. “I was worried.” 

“Sorry, El,” he comes to her and kisses her forehead, rubbing her arms gently. “I was talking with my professor. I’m gonna TA for him next semester.” He’s smiling down at her. 

El frowns. “So you’re going to be away even more?”

Mike presses his lips together. “It’s a paid position, El, you know we could use the money. Plus it’ll look great on my resumé.” 

She takes a deep breath through her nose and forces her tense muscles to relax. She can _hear_ herself being unreasonable, and doesn’t want to fight with him, ever. 

“Sorry,” she says, as she wraps her arms around his middle. “You’re right, that’s great.” 

He kisses her forehead again, then her nose, then her lips. She can’t help but smile. 

“Maybe I should get a job, too,” she muses as she lays her head on his chest. 

“If you want,” he agrees mildly.

\--

She does get a job, as a pharmacy assistant at a place near campus. She times her shifts to Mike’s class schedule, and it plugs the gap in their routine nicely. She never has to be home alone now. 

Mike stops by after class every day and picks her up, and they walk home together. It’s late fall, unseasonably warm, and the world is golden with bright leaves and sunshine as they walk hand-in-hand. 

El puts their previous issues down to teething problems - it was inevitable there would be some adjustment period after moving out, but the fact they’ve come through it closer than ever is just a testament to how strong their relationship is. She says as much to Mike, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close as they walk. 

One day Carol, who works the shift after El’s, is running late, and El agrees to stay until she arrives. 

“I’ll be another hour or so,” she says apologetically to Mike when he arrives to pick her up. 

“That’s okay,” he says. “I’ll come back.” 

He disappears off somewhere and returns exactly an hour later, and has to loiter for another fifteen minutes pretending to be intently interested in mens hair care products before El’s relief arrives. 

He wraps his arm around El as she comes around the counter, and waves to Carol as they leave. Carol, who’s never seemed to like Mike much, doesn’t wave back. 

Carol arrives ten minutes early the next day and hustles El into the stock room. 

“Look, I don’t want to overstep, but you know there’s resources, right?” she says urgently, craning her neck to look out into the pharmacy. “Like women’s refuges and stuff.”

“What?” says El, startled. 

“If you need help,” Carol whispers. “If Mike won’t let you go anywhere by yourself, I can cover your shift here and you can leave.” 

El stares at her for a moment, dumbfounded. 

Then she bursts out laughing. 

\--

For the first time, they decide not to go home for Christmas, and she can’t say that anybody is very happy about it.

Mike cringes as Karen wails down the phone about how Nancy and Jonathan are staying up in New York, and what about Holly, and why doesn’t he want to see them. 

Joyce takes the news more quietly, but El can hear how hurt she is. None of her children will be home this year. Will hasn’t set foot back in Hawkins since he left, and doesn’t appear to be planning on doing so anytime soon. Jon and Nancy are indeed staying in the City to be with Will this year. Joyce had been looking forward to having El home, she says, but she understands. 

El feels altogether terrible as Joyce passes the phone over to Hopper. 

“Hey Daddy,” she says, in what she knows is a blatantly transparent attempt to emotionally manipulate him into not being mad at her. 

He doesn’t go for it. “Don’t you ‘hey Daddy’ me,” he says gruffly. 

He says he’s not mad at her though, and she’s reasonably confident he’s telling the truth as he’s about as good at masking emotions as El is at reading them. Which is to say, not very. They end up talking for a long time, and he asks her question after question about her life, and what she’s up to, and their plans for the holidays. They’re on the phone so long that Mike pokes his head around the doorway, and makes a wordless gesture. 

“Dad, I gotta go - dinner’s ready, and you’ve been interrogating me for hours,” she jokes. 

“I just want to know what’s going on in your life. You hardly call home anymore.” 

El feels this statement like a punch in the gut, though she knows it wasn’t intended to be one. There’s an ugly twist of guilt as she realizes he’s right, she can’t remember the last time she called. Months, maybe. 

“Sorry,” she says. She can’t think of anything else to say. 

“Hey, I know you’re all grown up now, but give your old man a call sometimes kiddo. I worry about you out there.” 

“I’m fine,” she says, almost automatically. “I have Mike.” 

“Hmm,” is all Hop says in response. 

\--

That winter, she takes up crochet. She doesn’t have as much studying to do as Mike, and it’s something new to occupy her during their evenings on the couch. 

The first thing she produces is a lumpy and misshapen hat in cheap blue yarn, and she is inordinately proud of it. She presents it to Mike, who declares it the best hat ever to exist and dutifully wears it out of the house every day. Even when, after a lot of practise, she gives him a much better, more hat-shaped hat, he continues to wear the blue one. It looks ridiculous and she feels a huge swell of fondness every time she sees him in it. 

The call home over Christmas sits with her, and she makes a deliberate effort to call more often. She talks to Hopper and deflects his pointed questions about who she spends time with and what she and Mike do, apart from sit at home with each other. 

“I got a job,” she says. “I’m learning crochet.” 

“That’s great, sweetheart,” says Hop. “Do you ever hang out with the kids from your classes?”

“I don’t really have time for that.” 

On one of their calls, he tells her that he and Joyce are going to New York to surprise Will for his birthday. El asks if they’ll take a gift for her.

She buys an expensive yarn in a soft, buttery yellow. It reminds her of Will, always a bright, warm space in her heart. Carefully, she crochets the scarf, sometimes stopping to just finger the wool as she gets lost in some memory or other. 

It’s been so long since she’s seen Will, and their letters aren’t frequent any more. She sends them via Jonathan but Will doesn’t live there anymore and it is sometimes weeks before he replies. If she’s honest, her own replies are infrequent - she’s busy and besides, there’s not much new to say. 

She misses him though, so much it almost physically hurts her sometimes, so she tries not to think of him often. He’s doing better now, she knows from their family and her own uninterrupted sleep. More than better, he’s doing well. 

She wonders what he looks like now, if he looks older or different. The last time she saw him - in the Void - he’d been gaunt and miserable, a regrettably familiar state of being for Will. El wonders what thriving looks like on him. 

She could see, just quickly, just for a moment...but then she looks up at Mike on the other end of the couch, pen between his teeth, frowning intently down at his notebook. _No_ , she thinks, _better not_. 

She finishes the scarf and sends it off to Hawkins, along with scarves for Hop and Joyce, and she hears back via Hop a few weeks later that Will loved it. 

She’ll get round to writing him a letter one of these days. When she has some news. 

\--

“Jane!”

The sound of her name being called across the quad doesn’t register with El at first, she so rarely goes by it. It’s not until she hears “hey, Jane Hopper!” as someone is jogging up behind her that she turns around. It’s a guy from her chem class, slowing to a walk as he approaches. 

“Oh, hey…” she trails off, trying to remember his name. It’s _Brian_ or _Brad_ or _something_ —

“Ben,” he supplies helpfully. “Ben Smith? From chem.” 

She’d known that, at least. “Yeah,” she says, smiling at him. “Ben, hey. What’s up?”

“I missed the seminar on Wednesday, did you go? It would really help if I could get your notes, I tried to ask you after class today, but you were out of there too quick!” He grins at her good-naturedly. 

She feels rather than sees Mike come up behind her, in the familiar tingle over her scalp, in the way Ben’s demeanour changes as he straightens up and looks over her shoulder. 

Mike places a hand on the small of El’s back, and she looks up at him. He’s looking at the other man with an unreadable expression. 

“Uh, Ben this is my boyfriend, Mike,” El introduces as she starts to rummage in her bag. “Mike, Ben. We have class together.” 

“Hey man,” says Ben, as he holds his hand out to shake. Mike just stares at him and after a short pause, Ben retracts his hand awkwardly. 

El finally pulls out her chemistry notebook and thrusts it toward her classmate, who seems grateful to shift his attention away from Mike. 

“Oh, thanks Jane! That’s super cool of you,” he says. 

Mike has taken her hand and is already pulling her away. “Sure!” she calls over her shoulder. 

“Uh, I'll give this back next week?” Ben is watching them walk away with a bewildered expression on his face. 

She just waves at him. 

When they’re a little way up the street, El looks up at Mike. He’s staring straight ahead, one hand holding tightly to hers. He’s striding ahead so quickly she almost has to jog to keep pace with him. 

“Mike, that was rude,” she says quietly. 

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. “I was coming to meet you, and I saw him running up behind you. It made me nervous.” 

_Why_ , she wants to ask but it’s a stupid question. Nervous of a hundred things, of soldiers, of ghosts, of men in black, men in _white_. Things they never talk about, but always lurk in the shadows where they don’t look. 

Hell, it makes her nervous too...but it was just a guy from her class. 

“You don’t see me getting—” she says, before cutting herself off abruptly. _Getting upset when you talk to someone_ , she was going to say, but it occurs to her that she can’t remember the last time she saw Mike talking to _anyone_ else, stranger or otherwise. He doesn’t spend time with anybody but her. 

In the end, all she says is, “I can take care of myself.” 

“You shouldn’t have to,” is Mike’s only reply.

\--

El is left a little shaken by this experience, but the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes that while it took her by surprise, it’s also not completely out of character for him.

Mike has always held on too tight. He's jealous of her time and her attention and her love. Or maybe just scared, scared every minute, scared to death of losing sight of her for just a moment and finding her gone, scared of closing his eyes and waking to find the last ten years only a dream.

 

He's so protective (possessive) and she folds herself into the safety of his presence, both enabling it and drowning in it. She has encouraged this state of being, by clinging to him fiercely, by being just as jealous of his attention and just as solicitous. She has stolen his time, his affection, and all of his tomorrows.

They cannot sustain this.

\--

Just like that, it’s like it was before. Something has broken the still surface of her life, and now she knows it’s there, she can’t ignore it. 

If the problem before had been that they had drifted too far apart, this time they’ve gone too far in the opposite direction. Every waking minute they are not in class or at work, they are together. She thought that was what she wanted, how it always should have been, but now…the incident with Ben has set her thinking, the same way she did when Max pointed out the tension between them to her before.

It’s following this train of thought that El realizes with a start she doesn’t remember the last time she spoke to Max. The last time she saw her was the last time Max visited, almost _two years_ ago. Her own father had called her out for not being in touch. She’s stopped writing to Will. She doesn’t even _know_ how Dustin is doing these days, and she’s pretty sure Mike doesn’t either. 

She doesn’t know when Mike last spoke to any of their friends. She tries to remember him mentioning anything at all, and she can’t. 

She goes through the days, wakes up with Mike, waits for him while he’s at class, or works while he waits for her. They go home together, spend their evenings together. They don’t go out. They don’t see anyone else. They haven’t been home in forever. They are focussed entirely on each other, just the two of them against the world, but the world isn’t attacking them anymore. 

El muses vaguely that she’s swapped one kind of isolation for another, and she’d been happy to do it. 

More than that, it feels like they’re going out of their way to ignore the cracks, forcing something that used to come so naturally. 

El doesn’t know what to do. She only knows they’re hurting each other. 

In hindsight, this is the thought that precedes the end.

\--

One night, when Mike gets home El is waiting on the sofa, clasped hands squeezed between her thighs as she jiggles her legs nervously. She hears him drop his backpack on the floor, and the sound of his coat unzipping. 

He calls her name and she can hear his footsteps walking along the hall, and he appears in the doorway. He smiles as his eyes land on her and half a second later his smile drops slightly. He always could read her so well. 

“Mike,” says El, swallowing the lump in her throat. “We need to talk.”

.

Mike reacts predictably badly. The conversation gets ugly, fast.

.

“I can’t deal with this.” Mike holds up his hands and turns on his heel, and before she can even absorb what’s happened he’s walked right out the door.

For a second, everything is perfectly still. And then reality falls in on her like a building collapsing. El can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move.

When she acts, it’s on pure instinct. 

\--

She doesn’t actually know where she’s going until she’s standing on Will’s doorstep. She’s never known the address, but she’s never needed one to find him. 

When he opens the door she can’t speak, she just clings to him and refuses to let go. 

He ushers her gently inside, nudging her bag across the floor with his foot and shouldering the door closed behind them. 

Will is all nervous energy. Half asleep still, he holds her at arm's length and looks her over before hugging her tightly to him again. He’s panicking and trying not to show it, it washes over her in waves. His voice and the lines of his face are so familiar and so dear, and she can’t do anything at all except clutch at his t-shirt as something deep inside her clicks back into place.

.

After ascertaining that she is not hurt or in danger, no one has died and there is no supernatural catastrophe looming on the horizon, Will tucks her safe into bed and lies down beside her. Facing her, head pillowed on his arm, he reaches out with his other hand to brush her hair away from her face. 

“Please talk to me,” he whispers.

She squeezes her eyes tightly shut. The tears come anyway. 

\--

It’s not much, Will’s studio. A tiny place, a bathroom not worthy of the name the size of a closet, up the hall and shared with three other studios. The room itself is small, but high ceilinged. Windows with sheets hung over them in place of curtains that don’t do much to block the light but give the vague indication of the passage of time. Every surface is covered with clutter. Canvases are stacked in the corners – some finished, some half done. The scent of paint thinner and cigarettes hangs in the air. 

The bed is a mattress on the floor, crammed into one corner of the room, and El spends days lying there, unmoving, buried under a pile of blankets and pillows. Will comes and goes. Sometimes she hears him talking to people in the hall. Sometimes he brings her food she refuses to eat.

He comes home one evening and tells her he’s made some calls - to their parents, to Mike - to let them know where she is. He’s managed to drag bits and pieces out of her, how she shoved some clothes into a bag, walked out of her apartment and got on the first bus to New York. Has put together that she didn’t tell anyone else where she was going.

“Mike flipped out and called Hop,” says Will. “Everyone’s been worried.” 

El buries her face in the pillow and feels more miserable than ever. 

\--

There’s no heat in the studio and El has poor circulation. Her hands and feet are always cold. She’s used to tucking her freezing feet under Mike's legs, warming them against his skin, but the first time she tries it with Will she gets an elbow in the kidney.

He might be her soulmate but he's also her brother. She's pretty sure if she tries it again he'll shove her bodily out of the bed. 

She sleeps with two pairs of socks on from that point.

\--

Will is on a more even keel than he’s ever been in the entire time she’s known him, and maybe it’s selfish but she clings to him like he’s a life raft in a vast ocean, the only thing keeping her from drowning. Her whole world has gone out from under her. In the swirl and shift, Will is the one fixed point. 

He’s different, too. More at peace, somehow, but maybe with a harder edge than he used to have. 

He still doesn’t sleep much. 

Late one night, Will is sitting on the window ledge. The power in the building is off again and he’s squinting at a paperback in the dull glow of the streetlamp outside. He flicks the remains of his cigarette out of the slightly open window. 

“You never used to smoke this much,” she comments from her nest of blankets. 

“Okay, mom,” says Will, lighting another. 

\--

She gets out of bed. Schleps up the hall to stand under the bare trickle of the grubby shower. The door doesn’t lock and she keeps a slight pressure on it in the back of her mind. When she steps out, there are two kids sitting in the hallway and they eye her with suspicion as she walks back to Will’s studio. 

She doesn’t leave the building. 

The days pass sluggishly. Will goes to work, goes to class. One night he comes home with waffles for her in a take-out container - already cold - but they taste better than anything has since she arrived. 

When he’s around, he’s almost invariably painting. He produces work at a prodigious rate and when he runs out of canvases, he paints one white and starts fresh – he doesn’t seem bothered about the paintings he covers up but El mourns the work he so carelessly destroys. There’s something almost therapeutic in watching him, something soothing about his intense focus and the sound of brush on canvas. 

One morning he startles her by speaking after several hours of comfortable silence. 

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

El shrugs, picking at her fingernails. It takes her a long time to answer.

“There’s nothing much to tell,” she says, not looking at him. “Once it started to fall apart, I couldn’t stop it.”

He doesn’t offer any reaction to that and, after a long silence, she takes a deep breath and starts from the beginning.

When she was younger, El had found it easier to read to Will when he was dozing nearby. Similarly, now she finds it easier to talk to his back when she can pretend his attention is mostly elsewhere. 

Will doesn’t speak, doesn’t react at all except for fumbling his paintbrush slightly when she mentions the nightmares. She’s built up a head of steam by then, words pouring from her, so she doesn’t stop to question it. 

Its...not good, exactly, but it’s something. Like sucking on a wound. Drawing the poison out. 

It helps.

\--

It’s been three weeks in the City. Three weeks holed up in Will’s tiny, cold studio, hiding from reality. It’s been enough time for her to get over the initial shock of blowing her life up, and Will has been able to coax her outside into the world a little. 

New York doesn’t do Christmas by halves - everywhere they go there are lights and music and holiday shoppers laden with bags. Everyone is rosy cheeked in the bitter cold, and in a hurry and full of good cheer. It’s just like a cheesy TV movie, and it makes El want to die. 

Will doesn’t let her wallow. _He’s_ enjoying the festive spirit even if she’s not feeling it, and it’s while they are joining the tourists in admiring holiday window displays on Fifth Avenue - hot chocolate burning their hands through cheap take-out cups - that he gently suggests that maybe it’s time she went home. 

\--

It shocks her to her core when Will says he’s going with her. So shocked she can barely react at all when he packs both their bags, locks up the studio and tells a bald man with tattoos he’ll be back after the holidays. 

\--

When they get back to Hawkins, her dad gives her a stern talking to. 

After El took off, Mike had called in a blind panic to see if she’d come home. Hopper - having a hunch that if she wasn’t heading to Hawkins she’d be on her way to Will - had then spent several days sitting on his hands worried out of his mind waiting for her to resurface, knowing only that he wouldn’t find her if she didn’t want to be found. He’s disappointed that she didn’t call herself to let them know she was safe, and he tells her so.

El sits at the kitchen table while he lectures her and looks appropriately contrite - not difficult as she does feel genuinely terrible for worrying him - and after a few minutes he sighs heavily, and pulls her up to her feet and into a hug, and she has to pull away after a moment because it’s too much and she’s going to cry. 

Still, being home for Christmas is nice in a way. She spends a lot of time with Joyce and lets herself be mothered. It’s heartening to know that no matter what, she can always come home again.

\--

The only problem is that every inch of Hawkins reminds her of Mike.

Word has got around that their relationship is over, and she can see people looking at her, talking about her. She and Mike were a popular couple in Hawkins, love's young dream. Everyone assumed their future inevitably held marriage and kids and a nice suburban life in their hometown. Now it’s over, El can tell people think it’s her fault. She’s at the grocery store and five different people stop her to ask how she is, what she’s doing with herself these days, they heard she was living in New York now? All wheedling for any shred of gossip.

She doesn’t go out again.

.

 

Until of course, the Wheeler’s annual holiday drinks party rolls around. 

.

She’s not going. She’s just not. 

Oh, she’s invited - her whole family is invited, and Karen Wheeler would never be so rude as to specifically exclude her - but she and Mike aren’t together anymore, and their relationship collapsed so spectacularly that El is under no illusion that she’s actually welcome.

There is a not-so-small part of her that is desperate to see Mike. She hasn’t seen or spoken to him in almost a month, the longest they have been apart since the year she spent hiding in Hopper’s cabin, and she never thought it possible she could miss him more than she did in that year. This is so much worse, because now she really knows what it is she’s missing.

She is still firm in her resolve, that this is the right thing for both of them. That doesn’t make it hurt any less. 

She sits on the couch watching TV and flatly refuses to budge when it’s time to leave. Her family have mixed reactions. Hopper suggests that she should be allowed to stay home, and he should stay to keep her company. When this is shot down immediately by his wife, he gives El a half-hearted ‘well, I tried kiddo’ shrug and doesn’t argue the point further. Joyce thinks that Mike and El can work it out if they could just talk about it, and Will has so far refrained from expressing an opinion but she can see it written all over his face that he thinks she’s being a coward.

It’s a surprise when Jonathan drops down beside her, crossing his arms and staring at her while she refuses to look at him. He’s been pissy with both her and Will for days. First because he’d had to hear from Joyce that El had even been _in_ New York, second because she’d refused - via Will - to see him, and third because she and Will hadn’t included him in their plans for coming home and he’d had to hear from Joyce _again_ that they were in Hawkins.

 

When she won’t acknowledge him he nudges her with his elbow - probably a little harder than is _strictly_ necessary - and she slides her eyes reluctantly sideways to meet his. 

“Avoiding this now is only going to make it worse when you eventually do see him.”

.

Everything about the party is excruciating. 

She knows it’s a mistake as soon as they get out of the car. She’s been crammed between Will and Jonathan in the back seat, and the mutual crush has given her a false sense of security. As soon as the cold air hits her she wants to run away. They can hear the noise from outside, and she hates these things at the best of times and what the hell was she _thinking_?

Jonathan abandons them as soon as they get through the door, making a beeline for Nancy who gives El a tight smile when she sees her and, yes, this is definitely going to be awkward. 

Karen sweeps up to them - her expression freezes a little when she sees El, but her smile is real and she is sincere when she puts her hand on El’s arm and tells her she’s glad she could make it. 

It’s stuffy inside the house and there are a lot of people milling around. Aside from Nancy and Karen she hasn’t seen anyone she knows, but her stomach lurches at every vaguely tall and dark-haired man who enters her line of vision as she waits for the inevitable moment she sees Mike. He has to be here. 

“I shouldn’t have come,” she says, to no one in particular, but Joyce is close enough to hear and squeezes her shoulder sympathetically. 

“Just stay for half an hour, and then you can go home.” 

Before El can reply Joyce has followed Hopper to get a drink and left her standing with Will in the middle of the room. Almost immediately, Lucas emerges from the crush and before she can speak he’s pulled her into a tight hug, lifting her off her feet a little as he kisses the crown of her head. 

El feels the hot prick of tears in her eyes as relief floods her body. She hasn’t allowed herself to admit what she’s been so afraid of - losing not only Mike but her other friends. Even after all these years there’s still the nagging doubt in the back of her mind. If pushed, would they choose Mike over her? But if Lucas - so loyal, arguably Mike’s closest friend - isn’t inclined to take a side she can breathe a little easier, and she buries her face in his sweater as she relaxes a little.

He doesn’t let her go and she rests her head on his chest, feeling his voice vibrate against her cheek as he talks to Will, trying to draw a little of his strength into herself. El closes her eyes, not caring how it looks. Lucas is solid and steady as ever, and she feels calmer in the safe circle of his arms. 

It can’t last. A familiar shiver crawls over her scalp and down her spine, and she knows.

She opens her eyes, and sees Mike at the opposite end of the room. He looks as miserable as she feels and she doesn’t know whether she wants to take him in her arms or run away. 

There is a long, lingering moment where they just look at each other before Mike jerks his head in the direction of the basement. She takes half a second to ground herself, focussing on the scratchy wool on her cheek, the sound of Bing Crosby on the record player, before extricating herself from the safety of Lucas’ embrace.

.

El takes deep, steadying breaths as she follows Mike down the basement steps. It’s just as it has always been, warm and dimly lit. She can hear the muffled noise of the party upstairs as she looks around at the first place she was ever safe. 

She doesn’t feel like she belongs here anymore. 

She’s trying desperately to think of something to say but Mike beats her to it, he speaks as soon as her foot is off the bottom step.

“You scared the shit out of me.” Mike’s voice is rough, accusatory.

When she looks up at his face, his expression reminds her of a wounded animal. She doesn’t answer. It’s better to let him get whatever he’s got to say off his chest - she owes him that, at least.

“You just took off in the middle of the night. Jesus El, I had no idea where you were or if you were okay or...if Will hadn’t called I—” he cuts himself off abruptly. “What the hell were you _thinking_?”

She’s not sure if he’s expecting a response, and in any case he doesn’t wait for one. 

“I drove around all night looking for you, did you know that?”

She hadn’t known that, and she feels terrible. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re _sorry_?” He’s staring at her like he’s never seen her before. “El, after _everything_ , do you have any idea what it was like to come home and find you gone?”

She feels her hackles rise then. He’s laying the blame entirely at her feet and she can’t stop herself from getting defensive. “Do you have any idea what it was like to watch you walk out the door?”

He looks momentarily taken aback but recovers quickly, throwing his hands up, “You’d just told me you were _leaving me_ —” 

“I _said_ I thought we needed a _break_ , and you overreacted, _as usual_!” She takes a breath to continue but then bites down on her lip, hard. 

There’ll be no getting through to him tonight, she realizes. He’s too angry, she’s left him alone with this for too long and he’s had too much time to stew. He’s revised events in his own head and she knows him well enough to know he won’t hear anything she says, not until he calms down.

Worse, her voice is starting to rise with his, and absolutely the last thing she needs is every single person at the party above them listening to the death throes of her relationship. 

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” says El, shaking her head. 

She doesn’t give him time to respond before she flees back up the steps. 

.

El makes a beeline for Will. He’s still standing with Lucas, and Dustin has appeared. Will’s eyes are already on her as she emerges from the basement, and the others stop talking as she approaches. When she catches sight of herself in the mirror behind them she knows why. She’s pale and pinched, arms folded tightly around herself. She looks like she’s about to start crying because she is. 

She tells Will she wants to go home, not in half an hour, or five minutes, but _now_. Her voice quivers. Will doesn’t argue. 

Jonathan has disappeared with Nancy. Hop and Joyce are deep in conversation with Claudia Henderson, and Lucas is waiting for Max to show up so he can attempt a reconciliation to their latest split aided by mistletoe and eggnog. 

Dustin, in the ultimate gesture of mercy, holds up his keys. 

.

El climbs into the passenger seat of Dustin’s car while Will throws himself dramatically into the back. El has the beginnings of a tension headache behind her eyes and she sighs deeply as she slumps down in her seat and forces herself to be calm.

“What happened to the motorcycle?” Will asks.

El has no clue what he’s talking about, but Dustin shrugs as he starts the car. “My mom hated it.” 

They drive in silence for a while before Will pipes up again from the back seat. “Well, that wasn’t so bad.”

“Really, what party were you at?” El doesn’t bother to open her eyes.

“Well, it’s out of the way now. No one died.” 

He says it so reasonably she wants to punch him in the face. 

“No one died” she repeats. Her voice sounds oddly flat in her own ears. She’s dog tired.

Dustin says nothing for once, but he reaches over and pats her knee fondly.

.

She’s crying herself to sleep - great heaving sobs that shake her entire body. The muscles in her neck and chest are aching as she tries to keep quiet, biting down on her clenched fist, tears sticking her hair to her face and pillow. 

The door opens quietly and she doesn’t need to look to know it’s Will. He slides into the bed behind her and wraps his arms around her, squeezing tight. 

.

If anyone else heard her crying in the night, nobody mentions it, just like nobody mentions her pale face and bloodshot eyes. But Hopper leans down and kisses the crown of her head before he leaves for work, which almost makes her cry again, and Jonathan decides he’s over being annoyed with her and Will and declares he’s taking them out to the movies.

Some dumb kids movie is playing the matinee, something none of them would choose under normal circumstances, but as the three of them sit in the theatre squabbling silently over candy and throwing popcorn at each other, she’s grateful for the opportunity to switch her brain off for a while. 

\--

She spends time with each of her friends over the Christmas break - she goes for milkshakes with Dustin and long walks with Lucas, and Max pretty much moves herself into El’s house for the duration - but she doesn’t see Mike again. She can’t.

Will spends some long days at the Wheeler house, both alone with Mike and with the rest of the Party. 

That stings most of all, the thought of them all together without her, but what does she expect? Just because she and Mike can’t be in the same room, that doesn’t mean everyone else can’t be. She wonders if it will always be this way. Will the Party just move back and forth between them forever? What if some of them split off, pick sides? Will they all eventually just drift apart? 

What has she done?

If Mike talks about her ( _does he?_ ) nobody mentions it to El and when she hears he’s gone back to Chicago early, the blow doesn’t quite land the way it seems like it should. 

She feels hollow, like her insides have been pulled out.

In January, Joyce and Hopper start gently prodding her about what she’s going to do. She still has college and all her things are still in her and Mike’s apartment - all she has at the moment is what she hastily shoved into a duffel before leaving Chicago, and whatever was left behind in her childhood bedroom after she moved out. 

El doesn’t want to think about her stuff, about the lease on the apartment or her future or the classes she has surely failed after taking off without handing in her final assignments. She can’t think of anything at all except the blind panic of what she’s done and how she can’t see any way to pull it back.

For want of a better idea, when Will goes back to New York, she goes with him.

\--

Will tells her, pretty bluntly, that she’s not going to spend the rest of her life hiding under a duvet in his studio, crying. She’s going to have to find something to do with herself, _anything_ , or she can go beg mercy off of Jonathan, or go back to their parents, or out on her own, but he won’t facilitate this slow rot when he knows her to be made of stronger stuff. 

It’s a little shocking to El to hear this, but it gives her the necessary push.

The owner of a diner that Will likes to frequent in the small hours takes pity on her and throws a few waitressing shifts a week her way. Late shifts when it’s quiet. She’s shy and pretty and the late night customers like her - like flirting with her - but she’s more than capable of looking after herself and Will is usually tucked in a booth in the back, so she doesn’t mind. It’s easy work, once she’s used to the hours. 

She still doesn’t leave the studio unless it’s to go to work, but Will seems satisfied for the time being.

\--

About a month passes, enough time for her to settle into sort of a routine of going to work and thinking and trying not to think too much. 

She comes back to the studio late one night after work and stops dead in the doorway when she sees Mike. He’s perched on the single seat in the place, a stool Will sits on to paint, while Will himself is sitting on an upturned crate that usually houses spare canvases. 

They both stand up when she opens the door and nobody moves for a moment. 

Will is the first to speak - he announces he’s going to give them some space and all but runs for the door. He gives El an encouraging smile as he abandons her and she has to dig her fingernails into her palms to keep herself from grabbing desperately at him as he slips past. 

Will pulls the door closed behind him, and then it’s just El and Mike and the space between them. 

There is a short, awkward silence before Mike gestures vaguely to their surroundings. “This place is terrifying.”

It breaks the tension, and El can’t help the laugh that escapes her. She can well imagine Mike, her Mike in his argyle sweater, trying to find his way through this neighbourhood. He always was so brave.

His mouth quirks up at the corners, the faintest hint of a smile. He’s not looking at her like he doesn’t know her any more. He’s looking at her the way he always has, like she’s the only thing he can see. She feels suddenly warm. _Danger_ , her mind whispers.

“I feel bad about what happened at Christmas,” he says, looking down at his feet. “I didn’t— that’s not how I wanted that to go.” 

“Me too,” she nods. “None of this was to hurt you. That’s the last thing I would ever want.”

“I know.” 

She walks into the room and sits slowly on the crate that Will had been using as a seat. Mike sits again too, and there’s barely an inch between their knees. She’d hardly have to move her leg and they’d be touching. She wants to so badly. 

They talk for a while, at first haltingly, and then more easily. About what they’ve been doing since Christmas, he talks about class, she talks about the diner. They talk about Will, and about Jon and Nancy, about the rest of the Party and how they’re doing. They talk about everything except their relationship, until it’s the only thing they haven’t talked about and they can’t avoid it anymore. 

Eventually, Mike sighs deeply. “El, we can work this out, can’t we?” 

His hair is falling across his forehead, longer than usual. She wonders how long it’s been since his last haircut. Her fingers twitch and she has to resist the urge to brush it out of his eyes.

“Is that why you came?”

“Of course.” He holds her gaze. “El, I’ve come to take you home.”

He speaks low and soft, like he’s talking to a frightened animal - the same voice he used to use with her when they first met. She used to like it. 

Annoyance flares hot in her belly.

“So that’s it, it’s as simple as that, after all?” She can’t help the edge that creeps into her voice. “It’s time for me to go home because _you’ve_ decided everything is going to be okay?”

Mike frowns. “What? El, that’s not--”

“So what I think or want doesn’t figure into it at all?”

It’s the wrong way to approach it, the wrong way to handle him. She sees his jaw tighten, and it’s going to be like it was at Christmas but _worse_ and she can’t help it because she’s not crying this time, her blood is boiling. 

She stands up. Mike stands with her. 

“El, what are you even _doing_ here?” he snaps. “What about school? Or the apartment? What about our _life_?”

“What _about_ it?” It’s childish. She’s losing control. She can’t stop. 

“You’re just going to throw it all away?”

“Maybe I am!” El throws her hands up. “What’s it got to do with you anyway?”

“ _What’s it got to do with me?_ ” Mike thunders—

And then they’re yelling, screaming, at each other, and it all comes out. Every unspoken thing that’s been lingering under the surface for so long, a thousand petty hurts and miscommunications. The bigger fears that sit even under those. 

They scream until they are both red in the face and out of breath, and the glass in the window has cracked neatly through the centre. 

And still, the space between them. 

.

Mike stands by the window, hands shoved deep into his pockets, scowling out at the city. El sits back down and puts her face in her hands. 

“Mike, is this what we’re trying to save?” she says, voice muffled into her palms. 

There’s a pregnant pause. 

“You’re the only thing I’ve ever wanted,” Mike whispers, voice desperate.

“What about before?”

“What do you mean _before_?” 

“Before everything. Before we met?”

Mike turns to look at her then, wide eyed and bewildered. He looks like a lost little boy. 

It _hurts_.

He shakes his head wonderingly. “I can’t remember anything before you.”

“That’s what scares me,” El says, and the tears that have been threatening spill over, tracing hot tracks down her cheeks, blurring her vision.

There’s silence then - a few minutes or a few hours, she’s not sure - as the enormity of what is happening sinks in. El sits perfectly still. She’s not crying, not really, but the tears just keep sliding down her face and she can’t stop them. She can hear Mike taking slow, deep breaths. 

The floorboard by her feet is cracked - the wood split and splintered all along its length. She’s never noticed it before.

Mike’s voice is raw from yelling when he says, “El, _please_.”

She doesn’t know who moves first but suddenly they are crashing together, and his hands are in her hair, as hers fist into his sweater on either side of his ribs.

She kisses him and he tastes like home, like safety, like everything she's ever lost come back to her.

It's a dangerous feeling.

It doesn’t last long. They stand with their foreheads together, eyes closed, breathing the same breath. His hands slide from her hair to cradle her face, thumbs stroking across her cheeks, impossibly tender.

Mike was the first person ever to touch her with kindness.

He held out his hand to her, and she took it (she took everything). He was warm, and gentle, and she gave him her heart right there in the woods without knowing it.

It would be so easy to go with him now. She could go back home, back to their little apartment, back to school and their life together, like nothing ever happened at all.

This is the problem. This is exactly the problem.

It is so easy to fall into him, rely on him. Make him her whole existence. And he lets her. Knowingly or not, he facilitates her total reliance on him.

They are trapped in an endless feedback loop of need and codependency.

She can feel it sitting in the room with them - the urge to go with him, cling to him, follow him home, follow him _anywhere_ \- like she always has. It presses in on her, builds inside her. Hot and desperate, clawing at her insides, overwhelming.

She tells him to leave instead. 

  
  


_fin_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally longer, but it was getting unwieldy so I had to cut it down. I chose to end it here because I decided I liked the contrast of Will rising while El was sinking.
> 
> What was cut has now gone on to form a major chunk of a third story.
> 
>  
> 
> _Coming soon..._
> 
> **go home, or make a home, and rest**
> 
> _The noise in his head is a little overwhelming, at first._
> 
> _El is all raw and ragged edges. For the very first time, Will finds himself making excuses to be away from her. Intentionally or not she's broadcasting on all frequencies, sending out little jolts of misery that ping off his brain like blips on a radar. He can’t take it._
> 
> _He’d once absorbed all her emotions as easily as breathing. He realizes that the emptiness he’d tried so hard to fill in San Diego has become second nature somewhere along the way, and that maybe it wasn't just emptiness but the endless, echoing silence._


End file.
